Thanks for the information on the correct terminology. I would say one thing about your comment on being close to a piano. Plenty of people, myself included, grew up with an upright piano in the home. It was a regular activity to be right next to the piano as it was being played when family/friends were singing. I’m sure richer people had baby or even grand pianos in the home, my grandparents did. A piano does not have to be played loudly. Yes, it takes some level of skill and control to play quietly involving using the weight of your arm and to transfer the weight from finger to finger smoothly and using minimum motion.
Or we can just call this type of recording
hyper-realistic as I did, to begin with.
It exaggerates all the small details and gives a more distinct transient response because of the extreme close-up micing, there's nothing wrong with this type of recording, either you like it or you don't. There are no set rules for how a recording is supposed to be done, and I think the exaggerations that come with this type of close-up micing recording can be cool, it can serve as a replacement for the dynamic otherwise lost because most speakers can't translate the full dynamic swings of the original musical event.
And back to dynamics...
I find the aspect Klaus Heinz was talking about in the link I provided earlier to be highly interesting, something I think is overlooked in today's speaker designs (or they simply don't know how to solve it). He wants future developers to focus more on the speaker's ability to be able to translate a duplication of the input voltage to an equal duplication in the acoustic "area", a duplication of air movement so to speak.
That's something I also miss when listening to reproduced music. The dynamics are such an important part of the original musical event we like to replicate in our homes, not necessarily the dB level but at least more of that dynamic swing that's missing.
I attended a wedding party a few years ago and they had a band playing live, and damn those real dynamics got every single person in the building to dance in a circle, even the ones that normally never do.
And back to ATC from that...
I find my ATC speakers reproducing the dynamics better than most other similar-sized speakers do, but of course not even close to what Mr.Heinz was talking about, just a little better than the average speakers I've heard. I read somewhere that one of the set goals ATC had when they started developing their own speakers, was to combine the better dynamics of traditional PA speakers with the sound quality of HiFi speakers. I think that's one of the things many people like about their speakers. No magic, just an overlooked thing in the development of most speakers.