When the movie analogy was dropped onto this thread I wasn’t too keen on it, but I think there are some parallels between how movie making and sound recording evolved.
Many of the first movies made were filmed theatrical performances, either literal recordings of theatre stages, or movies played in a quintessential theatrical way. They were hampered by the fact that early movies had no speech, which is of central importance in much of theatre. That’s probably one of the reasons movies soon weaned themselves off their theatrical roots and found new ways of expression, even before they became talkies. Today, the typical movie (of any genre) has very little to do with a stage performance at a theatre (which you can still go and see, of course). The pendulum sometimes swings back, too, and you can see technology infused theatre performances that employ lots of movie-inspired special effects.
Music recording started in a similar way, with almost all of the early recordings being literal cuts of concert performances. In the second half of the last century music recording, too, moved beyond the capture of stage performances and started to add its own ways of expression. These days the performers involved could often be called recording artists, frequently one-man bands or small teams of collaborators. Their work is a synthesis of music and technology that has little to do with going to a concert (which you can still do). Again, the opposite trend can be observed, with DJs filling large venues for live concerts. (This is very broad strokes and there are all kinds of mixed forms and cross-over types of recordings, for example a lot of 20th century folk/rock/pop music started out on stage but was always “plugged in”, and hence had a natural shortcut into recording.)
Despite these parallels there is also a major difference: while the filming of theatre performances on stage seems to have gone out of fashion (as far as I can tell, anyway) despite the availability of movie sound, the recording of music concerts has not. Especially when it comes to classical music (in the wider sense), the recording of performances, just as you would attend them in person, is still thriving. I happen to be mostly interested in the these kinds of recordings, but I recognise that the majority of consumers of recorded music are not.
I think that unless we take into account that these broad types of music recordings – traditional concert recordings (even when done in the studio) on one side, and modern recording artist productions on the other – necessarily have different goals and different views of what sounds good or real, and clearly articulate which one we’re talking about, we’ll never get to the bottom of the debate in this thread.
