Happy New Year! I'm having a lazy New Year's Day, so here is a verbose reply:
This is an interesting dilemma. You want to impress listeners, who are probably inexperienced, hoping that they will think that you have a superb audio system, or that you have exquisite taste in recorded music, or both. There is no way to know the details of cause and effect, in what it is that impresses them. Maybe your system is flawed, but the choice of music impresses in part by not revealing the flaws – that is what I was describing as a certain category of “audiophile” music. Impressive in its “ultra-clear simplicity” but not challenging to the system. Maybe your system is magnificently neutral, and a demanding program sounds impressive because the listener has never heard such music reproduced with such transparency.
Audiophile notions of “resolution”, “detail”, and the like are mind exercises having a lot to do with the program and often less to do with the technical performance of the playback system. Double-blind tests have a way of revealing such things. As I have said before, the sound quality ratings go up as the audible evidence of resonant colorations goes down. Colorations in the playback system mask details in the music, but only if the music has the bandwidth and spectral density to reveal the problems. The only conclusion, therefore, is to use music that is capable of revealing problems, because when the problems are not heard, the result is that all your desirable factors are available to be appreciated.
Here is your summary of desirable factors: “Clarity. Vividness. Smoothness (not harsh). Wide frequency range. Rich (the sound has body, weight, not thin). Exciting dynamics/sense of impact. Timbral nuance and complexity. And, ideally a sense of spaciousness, and perhaps a sense of dimensionality to the sonic "images."
Most people live their lives experiencing insufficient bass quality and extension, a fact of life. We now know that low frequencies account for about 30% of overall listener preference in sound quality. So, clearly impressive bass is an essential starting point. Neutrally balanced bass is not a necessity, as mildly excessive bass is impressive and, even if recognized as such, a forgivable sin. So, forget about string quartets as program material. A good kick drum is a better start, combined with some synthesizer low bass that exercises the low end of subwoofer system, gently shaking the body. Many people will never have heard such sounds from an audio system, and you will immediately have their attention.
The second technical factor that impresses novice listeners is sound level. Most people have never lived with systems capable of “realistic” sound levels that utilize the full audio bandwidth. A good audio system can reproduce crescendos without sounding “loud”.
Beyond this, it is likely to be a matter of how well you have anticipated the musical taste of your audience. Recordings do vary in quality, but in my personal observations, the variations have reduced over the years. Modern microphones, studio electronics, monitor loudspeakers and room treatments in control rooms have become more similar and together capable of capturing, mixing and mastering sound with all of the inherent desirable sound qualities intact. There are occasional exceptions, but for me most of the compromised recordings are from the “good old days” that technically were not really all that good – nostalgia notwithstanding.
I had a shock when I visited a massive climate-controlled vault of archival tape recordings, many years ago. Analog tape recordings degrade with time, and are occasionally re-recorded or digitized for preservation. That is all understandable, but my greatest disillusionment came when I learned that many original studio master tapes had been scrapped and what was saved were the LP cutter tapes – compromised in various ways to allow the content to be cut into the inherently limited LP medium. Consequently, some of the first generation CDs sounded bad because they contained the pre-distortions necessary for LPs to be playable – mono bass, amplitude compression and high frequency rolloff to allow for inner groove tracking. Thinking at the time was clearly that the LP was the ultimate format. Wrong. Some “classic” master recordings gone forever.
You said: “But since we not only have "reality" as a reference, but now a history of reproduced artificial sound that has molded people's preferences, “
I grew up in the age of “High Fidelity”. Looking back, it is clear that reproducing reality was never a realistic goal. Back then, sound quality in microphones and loudspeakers was not neutral, 78 rpm records were noisy and distorted. Sound quality was obviously lacking, and in my youth, stereo did not exist. Once it was recognized that recordings had to be mixed from multiple microphones, the recording studio and control room became the dominant factors in what ended up in recordings. Recording engineers had arguably more influence over what we heard than musicians, and it was true at a time when all sounds that were captured were “live” voices and instruments. The “circle of confusion” reigned supreme.
Voices and instruments radiate sound in many directions, in reflective spaces, but a microphone captures only a tiny sample of the total sound, only at a single angular perspective, and much closer to the performer than any audience member is likely to be in a live performance. The “reality” as a reference notion was an unrealizable fantasy. I have never had my ear as close to a vocalist’s mouth as microphones are. I am visualizing Elton John “chewing” the windscreen on his mic. Classical music is multimiked at locations close to and often above the musicians, not 12 rows back in the audience. As you said: “"closer to real" was the guiding goal”, but while recorded sound quality has definitely improved, there has been no truly persuasive sensation of spatial “envelopment” to transport the listener to the recording venue, only hints. That requires multichannel. That would truly impress your listeners – it can still send chills down my spine when I hear it.
I can listen to stereo through a pair of Revel Salon2s and then add in some amount of Auro3D simulated surround through my 7.4.6 system of timbrally similar Revels. Guess which I prefer for the vast majority of recordings? I fantasize about a better upmixer; my old favorite the Lexicon Logic 7 is history, and I am “making do”.
