I heard this song on a friend's system and was taken aback by the level of realism possible. Instead of the distractions associated with usual stereo listening like the sweet spot, imaging, phantom images, depth(?) or whatever there was a coherent, unified, dynamic, distortionless (in a Linkwitz spatial distortion way?) wavefront of sound that duplicated a front row seat experience at the venue. In other words, we got lucky.
We tried other of her recordings expecting the same. Nope, not even close. It was back to what can be endlessly criticized and thought to be improved if only the soundstage was larger or the dispersion was a little more controlled, etc.
It gets worse. The "revelation system" consists of a brand of speaker noted for unacceptable anechoic frequency response deviations, the kind that can't be tamed in room based on a smoothing of the listening window or off axis listening, not to mention the severe port resonances. In a room with what I would describe as anti-treatment, no carpet, assymetrical, an L shaped wall at the left speaker and open 8 ft to the rear. A half wall 3" behind the right speaker and best of all a 60" TV between and a coffee table all within 2 ft of the speakers. I listened directly in front of the left speaker at the time, too
No problem, let's go over to my place and listen to the same song on my speakers that measure as a Klippel wet dream compared to the friend's, not to mention the room acoustics and at least 10db less background noise.
It did not pan out. The same polite, balanced, unoffensive playback the measurements strive for, not the excitement associated with that one time suspension of disbelief. Try to measure that.
To summarize, it was real and, maybe other than the person who did the recording, no attempt was made by us to make it sound that way.
