If you were serious about sound you would...

@donavabdear 

do you care about the most accurate sound or do you care about your enjoyment of music accurate sound be damned?

I care about enjoyment of music.   Accuracy matters and I tend to find that the two are highly correlated.

@mahgister Perfection in sound has nothing to do with this, I’m saying that the signal can’t be better (more accurate) than the original. There is a limit to the accuracy of the playback the limit is the quality of the equipment doing the original recording and mix.

The sound quality is not defined only by mixing and digital accuracy but by other acoustic factors as time and timing and different ratios of reflectivity...Then speaking as if " digital audio accuracy" was the main factors is confusing digital mixing with acoustic recording or worst subordinating recording to mixing as if the mix in itself  was the goal...And it is forgetting  that dsp mixing  are secondary compared the sound experience psycho-physical acoustic factors in the recording  concert hall and in the listening room ...

@mapman Great answer, but do you care about the most accurate sound or do you care about your enjoyment of music accurate sound be damned? Obviously you have given your expertise to the audiophile world which all around here appreciate. One of those branches is objective the other is subjective, your objective experience and commitment to audio is valuable but to me your subjective commitment to audio is only valuable is your ideas line up to my subjective ideas promoting confirmation bias something only the marketing department of audio manufactures need. I would really like your answer I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer.

My guess is that a recording engineer wants to hear everything with the greatest detail possible when recording an artist. The engineer then takes those tracks and modifies them if working in the digital domain, according to the engineer’s and artists’ tastes. And now, above all, the engineer wants to hear in great detail what effects the the digital processing have produced. Then, there is the whole process of volume control for the individual tracks. This is done for analog recording also, or adjusting where artists stand or microphone position if recording a "live" performance. I see this akin to a cook deciding on more or less salt. The engineer is messing with how much each track proportionally contributes to the final mix. Yet again, the engineer wants to hear exactly what these modifications have done to the mix. So I am naively assuming that the engineer wants a playback chain that is extremely fast and highly detailed. Whether the playback system "sounds good" is of secondary importance. I do not think that equipment used in a recording studio is even designed to appeal to the tastes of the majority of home users.

@mahgister I appreciate your point of view and I agree with all of what you said except for I feel like you have fallen into the common audiophile mindset that is simply wrong, I don't mean perspectively or subjectively wrong I mean wrong as in the difference between black and white. Many on this forum have no ability to separate the music from the sound and I should have spelled out the difference in my OP. Today live recordings of orchestras aren't recorded with 2 mics buttoned up and sent out to the masses to enjoy they have hours or days of post production, including filters, delays, reverbs, and loads of different kinds of limiters EQs and compressions. If you did get a pure recording with no post work I bet you wouldn't like the music because it's not what we expect anymore. Music today as you said is not real it is multitracked and manipulated is so many ways you would be amazed, generally it sounds much better than the original recording no doubt. The difference between the sound and the music is that the sound has nothing to do with anything in the recording or musicians the sound is simply a waveform it has nothing to do with bit rate sample rate acoustics engineers producers or microphones used in the recording the sound is what you have when the project is finished and it is the finished vision of the musicians and producers vision it can't be changed or enhanced after it is finished. Where this group goes wrong is evident in the posts even in this conversation audiophiles in general think sound engineers want detail and pureness the opposite is true most modern songs are compressed in dynamics and equalized all over, the "imaging" that is so religiously mentioned by the audio community is usually made by phasing tricks not by a producer mapping out where the musicians are playing on a virtual stage. Today because of Pro Tools and digital filters nothing is done as it was 30 years ago. The sound of the music is not real it is made up in nearly every way, the production squeezes out music like a cold line of toothpaste, the sound is unchangeable it is a baseline to be played in your listening room. By the way the models you see in magazines aren't really as beautiful as they appear Photoshop and Pro Tools do the same thing but once you have the finished product it is by definition the sound of the song. If an audiophile is not interested in accuracy of reproducing the finished product then there is no use being on a forum to learn about what other people like about a piece of audio gear or about how a sound makes them feel, it's their preference who cares.
 

Some of enjoy very old recordings that were recorded way before protools. They somehow sound real and wonderful. I'll keep my equipment.