Here we are... a group of people that had NEVER listened the product, that clearly don't even read the article that started this thread (dealing with most to their complaints), and only based on their preconceptions (and their much more limited knowledge on the subject than Choueiri, for sure) of what can or cannot be done with XTC, try to convince to the ones that listen B4M each day that...
When listening Beethoven's pastoral (Symph #6) by the Kammerakademie directed by Manacorda (Sony, 2023), those oboes and clarinets that you can pinpoint not only in span but depth, that you can even tell the distante BETWEEN them, that all of the sudden are listening all of the ambience (resonance, reverberation) of the concert hall; where somehow your listening room turns into a huge listening space; and then when turning off the dsp, with everything collapsing flat between the speakers without almost any reverberation at all, at best presenting a faint image of the orchestra groups as a whole... somehow this collapsed presentation resembles better what was truly registered by the sound engineer or what you hear at the concert hall (because, you have herd at least once a symphony in a decent concert hall, right?). That's about "type 1" recording techniques.
They also try to convince us that in "type 2, artificial end" recordings, like Garbarek's 'In Praise of Dreams' (ECM, 2005), where Jan not only plays his usual saxes with heavy reverberation -almost impossible to perceive in normal stereo -, his dialogs with the viola each perfectly delineated in space each one located in a steady place, but also synthesizers playing amazing spatial tricks that instantly transport you to the stratosphere; with Manu Katche percussions spread (as usual in ECM) at the whole width of the scenario; where Kashkashian's viola, with its reverb and chord vibrations so well defined that you can almost see the air surrounding her... are all gimmicks that would surely upset the recording engineer (James Farber), because somehow... that's not what he tried to do, and it's not closer of what he listens in his studio of controlled acoustics, with very close field monitors. That he obviously would prefer the multiple reflections blurring the image of any live listening room -as the one we all have in our homes-, where that reverb almost doesn't exist at all, where the synths spatial games just disappear. That those reflections and blurring are... quite more faithful to the intentions he had when mixing this recording in optimal conditions
