Now you are saying that instruments can sound natural and yet they are artificial.
Yes, in the sense I explained. Communication has context. In one context we can have a very wide division between "all things not created by human beings and all things created by human beings (natural vs artificial). In another context we can be talking about the division between "real vs reproduced - something as it is in real life vs our attempts at reproducing those qualities."
If for instance someone is working in CGI doing what is supposed to be a human character - take for instance ILM's creation of the recent ABBA digital avatars - if an animation director comes along and points out "the clothing movement looks unnatural" people generally know what she would mean. It's a way of saying it doesn't move like the real thing. If you were the animator and said "I'm sorry, that doesn't make sense, don't you know all human clothing isn't natural? It's a human made artifact!" The animation director would likely look at you, quite rightly, puzzled that you don't understand what anyone else would understand. You haven't actually made a clarifying point: you've misunderstood the context of the observation. Yes the animation director means essentially "doesn't move realistically" but you should have understood that.
Same with, for instance, if someone is listening to an orchestral recording in which the soloist has been turned way up, made huge sounding, with the orchestra sounding like this teeny little background. Someone could say the balance didn't sound natural. Most people would understand what was being communicated - the solist sounds far louder and bigger than the orchestra, which is not what you hear in real life. "Unnatural" in that sense.
I see no reason to slip in such imprecise terms here. You can simply say that the system sounds realistic, i.e. it reproduces the sound as heard live.
Yup. As I said, you can always talk in those terms as well, of course. Also, strangely, now you seem to be saying the goal of a hi-fi system is to sound realistic. (?)
Is that the goal, or is it to be accurate to the recorded signal? Because, remember, they aren't necessarily the same thing.
That is back to our original goal of hi-fi, to reproduce the sound of the source material as accurately as possible.
You still seem to be conflating the same issue.
You started with the reference to "reproducing the sound as heard live" and then moved to the goal of "reproducing the source material as accurately as possible."
They are not the same thing.
They CAN be equated - if a recording is sufficiently realistic then accurate playback will sound more realistic.
But that's only one case of many, Most recordings don't actually sound realistic, so accurate playback will NOT sound realistic.
The original goal of "high fidelity" was "fidelity to the sound of that which was in front of the microphone" - e.g. if you had a violin or voice in front of your microphone, you wanted to reproduce that sound as it sounded live. We can still talk about "fidelity" in this sense if we want to.
A later sense of "High Fidelity" also came to be later on, which is essentially fidelity to the recorded signal, reproducing it with as little distortion as possible.
We can talk about it that way too.
But that latter definition is decoupled from the former. High fidelity to a recorded signal does not automatically entail sonic accuracy to the real thing, or realism. And deviations from accuracy to the signal - manipulation - can in fact increase the sense of sonic realism.
