Sat front row at the symphony...

I find that Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh has some strange reflections. I prefer Synod Hall in Oakland. I decided to do a comparison once. I got a balcony seat at Synod Hall in the middle and leaned out and listened very carefully. Then I went home and put on a Telarc vinyl LP of similar music and listened carefully. The sound was the same ! I closed my eyes and I was back at Synod Hall. I opened my eyes and found speakers instead of musicians. I own full range electrostatic speakers. The bass is incredible with power and authority. You would swear I have subwoofers but I don't.

You may like the sound in the balcony and from your speakers, but this is a bit of an apples/oranges comparison.  Depending on the music, Telarc recordings employ a mix of close mikes and distant hall mikes to capture hall ambience.  Some recordings use several spaced omni mikes at the front of the stage.  The omnis reveal more hall ambience and less specificity of instrument placement than cardioid mikes.  The net perspective of the Telarc is about row 10, which is much closer than balcony perspective.  This correlates with my experience auditioning large stat panels such as Martin Logan, SoundLab.  Bass is powerful from the large panel area, but the large panel area radiates sound in a multitude of directions which causes high freq time smear and rolloff due to different time arrivals from all points on the panel.  

Even a balcony lover like mahler123 found that a recent concert of a Shostakovich violin concerto showed less detail in the balcony than his experience at home with an old recording of Oistrakh with Mitropoulos conducting the NYP.  If you want to judge the overall accuracy of your audio system, experiment with rows 5-15 and compare to the Telarc recording, or sit much closer near the stage for Mercury Living Presence recordings, or my favorite 1967 Turnabout LP of Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances with Donald Johanos conducting the Dallas Symphony.  A great companion Turnabout LP from 1967 is Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man, and Rodeo.  Very dynamic in your face Fanfare with brass and percussion, which I like better than a much more laid back audiophile recording of Fanfare on either Telarc or Reference Recordings (I forgot which).  Some pieces are appropriate for laid back recordings, like subtle Debussy, but Fanfare deserves more immediacy.

For accuracy, the original Quad 57 electrostatic is tops, although it is deficient in bass and loud dynamics. 

One of the reasons I attend concerts is because no matter how good my system gets, it will never approximate the sensations of a full orchestra in a large hall.  I especially enjoy hearing familiar works, not because I am adverse to unfamiliar music, but because I usually hear many details on the familiar works in the auditorium .  I just don’t need to be sitting in the conductor’s lap to hear and appreciate these details.  I recently heard a Mozart Piano Concerto where fingernail scrapings on the keys were clearly audible, and I could appreciate the soloist slowing down in some louder passages because of the hall resonance.  In my balcony seat there were very audible reflections from the sidewalls and the musicians were taking slight pauses to allow some of that to dissipate in order not to muddy the sound.  Now @viber6 would retort that a violin can’t be appreciated at that perspective in the same fashion as a modern piano can, and he has a point, so in an ideal situation perhaps sitting closer for VCs is advisable.  That is difficult because when one purchases a concert series you get the same seats all the time, but for one offs it is more feasible..

  Except….there are certain VCs where the Orchestra has at least as important a role.  For me the Sibelius VC isn’t just a vehicle for a hot shot soloist, it is basically a Symphony with a high level Violin Obligatto. I would prefer my regular balcony seat for those Sibelian brass explosions whereas @viber6 would want to be front row to fully appreciate the soloist.  And if you change your perspective every time depending on the work, then as a listener, what is your baseline?  It is a musical equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, in that by calibrating where our fannies sit to hear the music, we have distorted our critical facilities for true perception.  No, I ‘ll stick to the balcony perspective whenever possible 

There have been a few posters in this thread that have commented on the parallels between the dilemmas of concert hall perspective and the dilemmas in our home systems (analytical versus general perspective)..  A shout out to them for making this observation.  I used to have a DAC, the Mytek Manhattan, that was like an MRI machine for detail.  Ultimately I tired of the forest for the trees thing and got another DAC that gave me a mid hall perspective while not skimping on detail.

  I attended one concert in Heinz Hall, Pittsburgh probably 30 years ago.  I thought it was a great venue, although I am a bit fuzzy at this point about the details 

Interesting points about the Sibelius violin concerto.  The opening minute or two is very soft and dreamy for the orchestra, with the soloist a little louder so it is still dominant.  Orchestra and soloist are playing together in the appropriate balance.  Even later when playing together louder, the soloist is spotlighted over the generally softer fabric of the orchestra.  The popular violin concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky show more of the protagonist duels between the loud orchestra and the silent violin, and the soloist dominating over the very soft orchestra.  Thus, the popular concertos are more showoff pieces for the soloist, while the Sibelius has better balance.

Even for the soft, atmospheric opening of the Sibelius, while the balcony offers the ultimate in balance, its markedly reduced HF content vs close seats reduces the actual atmospheric and spatial appreciation.  Audiophiles call this "air".  In your home audio, you can try adding super tweeters to your main speaker to demonstrate and enjoy this.  I use the Enigmacoustics Sopranino in parallel with my main Audiostatic 240 speaker.  Another method which I find essential is careful HF boost with my Rane ME60 EQ, which I use in place of a preamp.  Boost the extreme HF only, so the midrange tonality is little affected.  This is particularly valuable with recordings done with a distant perspective, which I transform into a closer perspective.  What do I gain and lose by doing this?  Truthfully, the midrange tonality IS affected, but in a positive way by revealing the upper midrange/HF bite of the cello, trumpet, etc.  The purist will say that I am distorting the natural tonality.  But I regard the muddy veiling of distant sounds as the equivalent of the natural bland taste of aging fruit.  Everyone has tasted the more intense flavor of fresh corn vs bland weeks old corn.  It takes judicious practice to gain the benefits of revealing the full freq detail of any natural instrument while minimizing the changes in midrange tonality.  I consider my methods taking 10 steps forward and 1 step backward.

For learning the benefits of close seating without spending much money, find concerts with good music students, such as youth orchestras or semi-pro events.  Get a ticket on the main floor.  Start in row 15-20, the approximate equivalent in freq balance to the front balcony.  For the next piece, move to row 10, then row 5, etc.  For most listeners, row 5 offers the best of everything--full freq detail, balance, spatiality, ensemble.  Row 1 offers me THE best detail, although other areas are sacrificed.