@bdp24 wrote:
As for "hi-fi effects", it is image size and scale. Most loudspeakers sound comically "small" to me, the image of a grand piano, for example, being reduced to a miniature of it’s actual size. It’s like watching a movie on your iPhone. Hearing a doll house-size musical picture immediately destroys the suspension of disbelief.
Exactly. Much has been said about how this or that speaker - oftentime the smaller, monitor-style variant - is able to seemingly "vanish" in its mere physical existence leaving only the sound hanging in free air, but it's still glaringly obvious what's heard is a reproduction. A lot of aspects in sound reproduction, incl. the recording and acoustics, can make for an exposition and revelation of what is not a live, musical event, but there are core parameters more important than others which, when achieved in some minimum measure, are at the basis of a framework of sorts that makes reproduced music appear less of a facsimile. Size and scale are vital for this to come true, as are effortlessness, dynamic linearity and overall coherency/uniformity of the radiation bubble/sphere, and in what's supposed to be an approximation to "High Fidelity" in its true sense of wording in this hobby of ours it's beyond me how mentioned "macro parameters" aren't more readily acknowledged and pursued.