Home HiFi better than Live?

My goal is to get out and listen to live music at least once a week: mostly acoustic "folk" music, bluegrass, country, blues in a small venue. I prefer the local bar or coffehouse where I can sit where I want to sit for the best sound, if I get there early enough. The sound varies depending on where you stand in the room. I do not prefer venues where there are rows of seats, assigned or not - I can not move around to find the best sound.
In live music situations where I can move around and sit or stand where I want to sit or stand, I always enjoy the sound better than the sound of my stereo. (I also like to drink a beer when I listen to live music, which is why I prefer the bar scene.)
Back when I lived in Dallas, I would go to the Honky Tonks, ("Cowboys", Country 2000, Red River, the Top Rail) and would pay ten dollars to hear a "big name country star": Leroy Parnell, Steve Wariner, Gary Stewart, Exile, Rick Trevino.... There was the stage, and in front of the stage was the dance floor where people would stand to watch and listen, and people would dance behind the listeners. I could move about the dance floor, and I found the place where the vocals were the clearest and that is where I would stand. If I stood somewhere else, the vocals would be muddled. In a bar or club or honky tonk type venue, the quality of the sound depends on where you stand. I never went to the famous "Billy Bob's" honky tonk in Ft. Worth, because of the assigned seating up by the stage, and I could not stand where I could hear quality sound. I went to hear Gary Stewart once at Billy Bobs, and the sound and experience was so mediocre, I never went back there again.
So to answer the origional post, I prefer live music over my stereo, especially if I can move around the venue and not have an "assigned" seat.

Mfkeleher, I agree and relate with you! I have always wanted to be sitting next to the guy who yelled “Whipping Post”. The last few concerts I went to (Beethoven’s 9th and a Traffic reunion) my fellow concert goers coughed, talked and yelled during performances. How can a person enjoy the show when the person next to you is sucking there dinner from between his teeth? Or how about the large person trying to get to the center of the row and sticks their HUGE, well perfumed rear end in your face.

Yes, there is nothing that can match a live performance in the right venue but for me I’d rather sit is my recliner with a cup of coffee and Ludwig blasting.

Yea, despite all of my verbiage (arguably) to the contrary, Seandtaylor99 and Garfish hit it on the head -- they're inherently different beasts, each enjoyable in its own right, and the extent to which one approximates the other is often wonderful, sometimes meaningful, but really somehow secondary. Music in any form is worthy of enjoyment. Isn't that the bottom line? Anyone's preferences based on recourse, circumstance and personal preference is hardly a basis for all of the puffery, bombast, and patronizing that some of the posters (myself included, mea culpa) seem to be shading towards. If it sounds good and you're having fun, then you're doing it right. Kick back, enjoy.

I'm glad I managed to bring some agreement. I've thought for a long time that, unless the recording engineers are genuinely trying to recreate a live performance (as they usually are with jazz, classical, and some rock/pop albums) that the recorded medium is very different, and is best treated as such. Some of my favourite studio albums (Crowded house woodface being an example) are well mixed because the engineer followed the rule of separation : instruments in the same frequency band must be separated in the stereo mix, instruments in the same part of the stereo mix must be separated by frequency. Following this rule leads to a wonderfully airy sound where one can have many different things "going on" without them interfering. Of course it's about as far removed from a live performance as you can get, but it works for me. Many studio albums that try to sound live by making the stereo mix resemble a stage setting end up sounding muddled because the drums are all crushed together in the center, overlapping the vocals, and having bass panned to one side just sounds odd. Engineering is a real art .. as much as the performance itself.

I've been obsessed with this crazy hobby on and off for almost twenty years now. I've heard some pretty great systems in that time, and currently love my SET/horn system at home that brings the performance right into my living room up close and personal. I also have a good friend who owns an amazing high-end all-Levinson system, as the original poster mentions they do. His system is set up to the nines, and is in a great listening room. I prefer my SET system, but his does have some merits that mine does not (and vice-versa). That said, I have NEVER been able to achieve the kind of adrenaline-driven deep and primal satisfaction, from ANY of those systems that I've heard, that I consistently experience in the best of the live performances I have enjoyed. I absolutely get profound enjoyment from hearing my system singing for me, all by myself and comfortable in my home...and it frequently gives me goosebumps at how real it can sound. But the idea that it can actually replace or improve upon a great live performance in a good venue is utterly ubsurd to me. The experience is entirely different, unless you are dead to the world around you! I mean no offence here, but live music has moved me in ways that are entirely unique to that experience. I've also had horrible experiences listening to live music for a whole variety of reasons (bad performance, bad venue, bad audience, etc.). Those things that are unique to live music cannot be replicated by ANY machine as they are all about life, energy, interaction and electricity (between living beings...performers and audience). Take the music out of the picture just to illustrate a point: Stand alone in a room and you may feel a certain way. Add one person, even without any verbal interaction, and your experience will be entirely different. At a few hundred people and, again, you change the experience entirely. It may start to sound a bit new-age and spiritual, but there is no denying that we are all emitting energy as long as we are alive, and perhaps even to some extent when we are not. Some of that energy can be quantified, and some is entirely invisible and much of it may remain mysterious and unknown. Bring music into the picture now, and actually start to deliberately express and guide the energies of hundreds of indivisuals en masse and you have one very powerful experience (pleasurable or not is up to the individual and circumstances). Remove the crowd, and replace the performer with a machine that only emits one tiny aspect of that energy (the music), and your experience will be ENTIRELY different...there is certainly no debating that in my mind. Bottom line for me: I do enjoy both experiences, but my system only bears a resemblence to listening to live music in only a very surface regard. If you are talking strictly about an AURAL comparison of the two.....well, why even bother! We all have at least four other senses that come into play, and I'm quite certain there are more that we're unaware of that come into play as well. We also have a heart, a soul and a brain (though any one of those three can be debatable with the individual ;-), as well as our filters of individual experiences, all of which processes all of this, much of which I really doubt we completely understand. Too many thoughtful responses to this post to keep track of, but the comparison between porn and making love someone made, illustrates the same concept I am trying to.