Live vs Reproduced Sound - your thoughts?

[Chrispy]

Then your system isn’t resolving enough!

LOL

 

[audiofooled]

I wonder if there is a similar, and as yet un-studied effect in audio. If you have ever watched a jet taking off, or witnessed an explosion or controlled demolition, or some kind of loud natural phenomena ... there is a certain sense of scale in the sound. Many years ago, I worked in a hospital in a mining town. The mining company would post a timetable for their controlled explosions, and you could go to an observation deck to witness the explosion. You know it's big, and I don't think it's just your eyes that tells you it's big. Even though it's far away you can feel it in your bones and you are immersed in sound.

Some of the phenomena, with regards to how the hearing works, non-linearities of the mechanism, as well non-linearities of the air transmission itself, @j_j talks about for 6 minutes starting from here:

In a large scale acoustic event, there are things which cannot be easily predicted or modeled by the means of Linear Acoustics. Explosions are certainly in the domain of NLA, as anything that's over 140 dB of pressure, which is not the same as loudness you actually perceive at a certain distance, for the brain to process.

In the video I posted earlier, four of those main J arrays contain 48 units each, with who knows how many subs either flown or on the ground. The pressure near the system can be very high, where some of the effects of low frequency transients may be observed in the top camera looking over the mixing console.

The system that hopefully sounds good at a certain distance and has even coverage most places in the audience (that's what they would want), could also introduce some interesting effects that you may actually feel, but the transmission starts over there and the direct sound gets to you first. However, even in the clear direct path, the outside air movement, also low frequency fundamentals can have audible effects by modifying the time of arrival at your ears and the spectrum so that, apart from just knowing you're being there, you can also tell the proportions of the acoustic event.

 

[STC]

This post took me back to a 1999 Stereo Times piece. I probably only read it about ten years after it came out, for a simple reason: my then system still would not recreate live realism to my liking, even though every audiophile who has sat in the man cave seemed satisfied enough.

The complaint is not new. The goal was never a measured photocopy of one concert. It was whether the ear-brain will accept the field as a place you could actually be sitting, with sources that still sound full-bodied and distinct. This was discussed in 1999. The opening post is saying it again. I think we are generally recycling same issues in different ways. It keeps reminding us whats missing. And always will be missing..

A few parallels and differences, tabled so it is easier to see how little the question has moved.

Theme	1999 Stereo Times	2026 -This OP/thread	Remark
The question	Reproduce an event at another place and time with as little loss of realism as possible.	Can reproduced sound ever seem truly live? If not, why?	Same brief, 27 years apart.
What “real” is	A field the ears accept as the same space as the performers; a space that could exist; sources full-bodied and easy to locate. Realism ≠ accuracy.	Scale, image, detail, impact were already there on those Genesis 1s. What failed was living colour / variety.	Both refuse to treat a sharp stereo picture as “live.”
The photograph	A small B&W TV still lets you locate objects. That is not vision. Colour, then depth, then full field each expose what was missing.	"A huge Ansel Adams black-and-white photograph of an orchestra… missing the rich sense of timbral colours.”	Same metaphor. Form without life.
Identifiable ≠ real	A soloist from one loudspeaker is easy to localize and almost never sounds real.	Instruments identifiable, but like plastic replicas made of the same material.	Recognition is cheap. Presence is not.
What is missing	Completeness and sonic consistency. All of the ear’s expectations have to be satisfied at once.	After a few tracks: “OK… that’s how those instruments will sound on this system.” No more surprises.	Same symptom. OP hears it as timbre. Glasgal named it as incomplete, contradictory cues.
First wrong guess	A curtain of mics and speakers still fails; each speaker becomes a new source both ears hear.	Too few drivers to recreate hundreds of vibrating sources.	Both start here.
Why that guess fails	Deliver to the remote ears a replica of what those same ears would have heard at the live seat.	The eardrum already sums the pressure. A few membranes are not impossible in principle.	Bottleneck is the cue package at two ears, not driver count.
Closer makes it worse	Each step -mono, stereo, matrix, discrete - amazes, then you remember the hall	When scale finally arrives, the missing colour jumps out.	A better photograph makes the missing colour more obvious.

So this difference was identified a long time ago, and people have been trying to close it for a long time. Not by cloning Avery Fisher Hall brick for brick. By getting the realism of live sound — a physically possible space, consistent cues, sources that do not all sound like they were stamped from one material.

Has it been resolved? In principle, yes. Crosstalk-cancelled two-channel playback, and the fuller “domestic concert hall” idea (front stage plus real hall ambience from around you), can get much closer to “you are there” than the 60° triangle. Implementation is the problem. It is fussy. The seat is small. The room has to behave. Visitors who love the stereo triangle often do not want to sit still in that chair.

It is also, frankly, a slightly anti-social form of reproduction. It is built around one head. Live music is usually more than one person in the same room, and that extra variable — bodies, sightlines, shared air — is part of what people mean by “live.” Maybe that is off topic. It just struck me, reading this, that we are still having the 1999 conversation.

We got better photographs. We are still arguing about colour. And the Stereo Times article is here. https://stereotimes.com/post/realism-in-music-reproduction/

ST

 

[Flaesh]

It just struck me, reading this, that we are still having the 1999 conversation.

Yeah. I checked the date three times while reading