I grew up with a jazz musician father who played trombone and trumpet in the house regularly. I played in all the school bands, stage band etc. I have attended countless concerts featuring brass instruments, from jazz to orchestral and otherwise, and I played in a funk band for 15 years, featuring a full horn line up. Further, I live beside a highly populated city street where we regularly have live bands playing in pubs, and street musicians playing brass instruments. Just about every time someone is playing a horn, I stop, close my eyes, to take a measure of how live horns sound compared to what I'm used to in reproduced sound. Further, one son played sax, the other trombone, and I recorded both, comparing the live vs reproduced through various speaker systems in our home. I'm a bit obsessed with live vs reproduced sound, fascinated by it.
I'm pretty familiar with the sound of live horns
But this gets exactly to the issue I've brought up before in terms of the subjectivity involved in preferences and evaluating sound, especially in regards to "does it sound natural/believable?"
For the most part as we all know, reproduced sound, starting with the artificiality of the recording/mixing process onward, is full of compromises in terms of any sense of "realism." It's pretty much laughable to compare, for instance, the horn section in some of the funk tracks I was playing last night with a real horn section playing beside me (as they did when I was a keyboardist in the funk band), or just in the same room (as I rehearsed with them for 15 years). The reproduced horns are teeny representations, diminished in virtually every way, to toy versions.
So I'm not likely to be fooled any time soon that I'm hearing real horns or other instruments. But live sound is for me a guide to some of the essential characteristics I want to hear in even a toy version of an instrument.
You are certainly right! Brass instruments can have a sharp blatty attack to their sound, of course! But in the presence of horns when I listen for the sound characteristics I'm struck by how huge and rich the sound is, how the "blattiness" of the horn isn't at all like the over-sharpened spiky sound of a lot of horn recordings, but even the leading edge is bigger, rounder, shimmering with harmonics. Real instrumental tone is both clear, vivid yet RELAXED sounding to my ear.
It's that combination of qualities that I enjoy most when I can get it in reproduced sound. So when I hear horn sections on my system that sound vivid, dynamic, with that "blatty" attack yet at the same time sound more full and relaxed, that to me sounds more natural. I luxuriate in it the same way I do when listening to live instruments.
But these preferences in selecting my sonic compromises are informed by my own experience and criteria.
Presuming for sake of argument the sound of trumpets via the Bryston are different in the way I describe them from the CJ: I can easily imagine that you may hear the sharper, brighter attack of the Bryston version and judge it more realistic. Which is perfectly legitimate. But since the horn sound is so compromised to begin with, in my view you'd be seizing on one aspect that strikes you as more real to you, where I am siezing on others - the slightly fuller, rounder, more relaxed quality, that I find to be more "accurate" to the real thing. Neither version captures everything about the real sound of horns, so we may prefer different areas of compromise.
Cheers!