The Shure V15 V with a Jico SAS/B stylus VS The Soundsmith Hyperion MR and Lyra Atlas SL

@mijostyn Peter Walker of Quad used to do A / B demonstrations of his electrostatic loudspeakers, which were hidden behind a screen. Often B was a live string quartet.

I am not talking about dynamics in what follows, but imaging! Not just imaging, but the pin-point imaging loved by reviewers but absent in my opinion from any un-amplified live music venue.

The role reflections play is remarkable, both from the surfaces of the recording venue and of the listening space. I will always remember the utter strangeness of sound without echo.

First time was in a big anechoic chamber (anechoic = no echo!). Totally disorientating. The second time was sitting on top of Iron Knob, an abandoned ore mountain looking over the Nullabor Plain (nullabor = no trees). The Nullabor Plain is possibly the world’s largest infinite baffle. The railway line goes straight for 297 miles. There’s nothing to reflect anything, except the ground. There were no birds, no rustling of the wind, just an occasional dust trail from a vehicle 50 miles away on its way to Perth. Absolute silence and equally disorientating. My conclusion is that a great deal of what we normally hear is reflection.

I have not been to the Boston Symphony Hall, but agree that logically the ideal sweet spot has to be on the centre-line. But how far back, or even forward? One obvious singularity is where the conductor stands. Unfortunately, the conductor is almost always too close to the nearest instruments to hear the intended balance. Where else? Maybe where purist recording companies put their microphones (I am thinking Mercury)?

Norwegian 2L recording engineer Morten Lindberg recognises that all recordings are an illusion. Why not put his multi-channel microphone tree where the conductor normally stands, but push the instruments back into a circle where they carry equal sonic weight from the conductor’s position? Works for me!

My favourite 2L recording is probably Australian pianist Percy Grainger playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto, recorded way back in 1921. The piano was originally recorded as piano rolls and is replayed on a modern piano with a symphony orchestra recorded in immersive sound.

In many other ways Percy Grainger was a century ahead of his time, but that is another story.

I need subwoofers to replicate the sound of small group jazz taking place 20 feet from my chair? I have to say no to that. None of the instruments get below 50 Hz, where my ESLs operate just fine, and there is no hall to reverberate in a small jazz club. Anyway my Beveridge system does have very articulate bass down to 20-30 Hz, owing to my transmission line woofers ( not subwoofers but woofers nevertheless, that operate below 80 Hz). My only point was that in live venues, imaging is not much better if at all better than what I hear at home.

Now, if I go to the Kennedy Center to one of the concert halls, that’s a different story.

@richardbrand I specified the distance, 10th Row. I grew up in the Boston area and my father had season tickets for many years. Of course reflections are a great deal of what we hear and to get a well defined image in any situation, real or imitation requires the right listening position and in real situations a bit of luck. Our own systems require a good room and intelligent set up. I have to admit that in most live situations you do not get a decent image but that is over ridden by the visual and dynamic aspects of the performance. When I watch concert videos I am too busy watching the performance to pay attention to the image. To pay attention to the image I have to close my eyes. At large indoor stadium concerts the sound is usually awful. I will only go to outdoor venues like Red Rocks and Boston's Harbor venue. The sound is still mono, but at least it is not being corrupted by extreme echo. 

The image that a recording projects is in itself an art form. It is fun to be able to pick out individual instruments and once in a blue moon a great set up can mimic real life. I saw the Dave Holland Quintet 3 times at the Regatta Bar in Boston. The recording "Not For Nothing" portrays that experience almost perfectly. I can close my eyes and easily take myself back to that performance. I saw Cecile McLorin Salvant  at the Blue Note in NYC and the recording "Dreams and Daggers" mimics that performance perfectly, scary perfectly. Neither recording has a perfect image as one could imagine it, but they replicate almost exactly what you hear at the real performance. I am also sure there are other recordings that do this, but these are two I was at the actual performance.  

The microphones recording symphony orchestras are hung above the orchestra with ambience microphones placed elsewhere in the venue. 

As @lewm stated the thing that really separates live performance from what we hear at home are the dynamics which are a function of bass performance and transient response. Both are absent from most systems. Image, Bass and transient response are the aspects of HiFi performance I have been chasing since the age of 13. I did not get close until I was about 22 and the I did not get to live performance levels accurately until about a year ago at the age of 69. It takes a full range line array from 18 Hz to 20 kHz, power and digital signal processing. There is a specific frequency response curve required to do this in residential spaces. You have to equalize every system following the measured response with a little by ear tweaking. This can only be done without detriment in the digital space. To get the best image the channels have to be equalized separately and have exactly the same response curve so that the volume of the two channels is exactly the same at all frequencies between 100 Hz and 12 kHz. No two speakers are exactly the same. Then you put them in different locations and they become very even drastically different. IMHO every audiophile should have a USB measurement microphone and an audio program for their computer. There is no other way to learn what one is listening too. 

For what it is worth, and this is for the folks here that are sneering at the Shure V15 Type II, …. I know an engineer who builds much of his own gear - speakers, amps etc - and who has 5 Grammys sitting on his fireplace mantle who says that he feels the Shure V15 Type V is the best cartridge out there. Not the best for the money. The best.

so there is that. 

I have 3 Koetsus (selling one btw), I have not taken that advice. 

@mijostyn 

"I specified the distance, 10th Row"

True, and many people would roughly agree with you.  But there is nothing mathematically special about the 10th row.  Why not the 9th or the 12th?  Or an equal distance behind the orchestra?  I hear your advice but want to also make my own mind up.  It is well worth reading Morten Lindberg's philosophy of the art of recording About 2L (Lindberg Lyd).

"It takes a full range line array from 18 Hz to 20 kHz"

If the alternative is separate dynamic drivers, then I understand where you are coming from.  But there is an alternate solution which should be better. The problem with a line array is the arrival times from the top, middle and bottom differ, which produces wave reinforcement and cancellation at various frequencies.  One symptom is that your head has to be at the 'right' height for the audio image to snap into place.  A secondary issue is that the path length differences are accentuated by reflections from room surfaces.

The solution I prefer is the virtual point source electrostatic panel invented by Peter Walker of Quad in 1963.  These panels have all the virtues of other elecrostatics, plus the point-source.  Most people including reviewers don't really get how the virtual point source works, so here's my interpretation. 

Imagine a point source of sound waves one foot behind a flat sheet of mylar.  As a wavefront starts to radiate from the point source, it first contacts the center of the mylar sheet, then progressively expands outwards in a full circle which grows in diameter.  The geometry and timing are totally determined by the speed of sound.

Peter Walker's design drives the mylar sheet electrostatically with a set of concentric anode rings carrying the audio signal.  The signal is delayed slightly to each successive ring, so the net effect (except in the plane of the panel) emulates that point source of sound a foot behind the panel.

It is not immediately obvious why this should sound good, but the answer lies in the coherence of both the direct sound and reflected sounds.  This speaker and its descendants are widely recognised as the most accurate speaker.  Note I did not say best!  For one thing, they do not play particularly loud.  When my ESL-63 pair was working, I got them louder by relieving them of bass load by using a pair of Duntech Thor sub-woofers.

Duntech was the brainchild of US physicist John Dunlavy, who moved to Australia and designed and built his high tech Sovereign speakers here.  Above all, they were designed to be loud and time-coherent. The reference speaker he used was the Quad ESL-63.  He designed the Thor to go under, which also raised the ESL to a better height.  When he returned to the US, he launched Dunlavy as a more affordable brand.

Later I replaced the Thor sub-woofers with an 18" Velodyne servo-controlled unit which can go very deep.  It comes with its own microphone and equalisation capabilities. Time coherence disappears as an issue at the long wavelengths of deep bass.

When my ESL-63 speakers started to fail, I replaced them with ESL-2905 which are identical except they have six panels instead of four, to give more bass extension, and are tilted slightly back.  This FRED (Full Range Electrostatic Doublet) goes quite low from 32-Hz to 21-kHz -6dB.  More impressively the harmonic distortion is quoted (100-dB on-axis at 1-meter) as 0.15% above 1000-Hz, 0.5% above 100-Hz and 1.0% above 50-Hz.

"To get the best image the channels have to be equalized separately and have exactly the same response curve so that the volume of the two channels is exactly the same at all frequencies between 100 Hz and 12 kHz. No two speakers are exactly the same"

The final quality test for Quad is to position a reference speaker and the test exactly equidistant from a microphone. A square wave (which theoretically contains all harmonics) is played through one speaker, and out-of-phase through the other.  The speaker passes if there is complete cancellation, that is to say no output from the microphone.

"Then you put them in different locations and they become very even drastically different".  

Peter Walker made a big thing of getting the room eigenvalues right, whatever that means.  But once the speakers are positioned, you can walk around several paces without losing the imaging.  When you get close to one speaker, you can hear the sound coming from a foot behind, even when you move behind the speaker.  There is meant to be a null in the plane of the speaker, but I have two ears, and they are never both in that plane.  It is quite uncanny.

"IMHO every audiophile should have a USB measurement microphone and an audio program for their computer".

That's what I am doing with my Garrard project.  Measuring every change when playing a silent track!  One of my cartridges is a Shure V15 type III which vaguely keeps this on-topic!

Once again we seem to be in violent agreement on most things ...