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.
