As soon as I encounter anybody making a rather obvious statement that the pursuit of the original musical performance experience is futile and unobtainable, I question whether they are making this mistake (of choosing the wrong objective) deliberately, or whether they are genuinely accidentally misunderstanding the point of sound reproduction.
The truth is fairly simple and is certainly achievable, and worth striving to attain. And that is, to reproduce with fidelity the actual recorded music production that was made by the musicians in concert with the sound engineering and recording team. The experience that they had in the mastering suite is a work of technical art wrapped around a piece of musical performance art, and they made that sonic experience and not any other sonic experience, and striving to hear what they heard, and reproduce what they produced, is worthwhile and worth doing.
Accuracy to the original production is achievable, not unobtainable.
The closer you can make your home playback environment resemble the mastering suite (room) and speaker performance, the more you can approach true accuracy. You want to experience the actual product that they actually made for you? Then do this. Toole calls it Closing the Circle of Confusion.
Calling it an unattainable illusion is what I would describe as settling.
Let's hear from Toole himself (my emphasis added):
"It is important to differentiate between the production of a musical event and the subsequent reproduction of that musical event. Subjectivity – pure opinion– is the only measure of whether music is appealing, and it will necessarily vary among individuals. Analysis involves issues of melody, harmony, lyrics, rhythm, tonal quality of instruments, musicianship, and so on. In the recording studio, the recording engineer becomes a major contributor to the art by adjusting the contribution of each musician to the overall production, adjusting the total balance and timber of each of the contributors, and adding reflected and reverberated sounds or other processed versions of captured sounds to the mix. This too is judged subjectively, on the basis of whether it reflects the artists intent and, of course, how it might appeal to consumers.
"The evaluation of reproduced sound should be a matter of judging the extent to which any and all of these elements are accurately replicated or attractively reproduced. It is a matter of trying to describe the respects in which audio devices add to or subtract from the desired objective. A different vocabulary is needed. However, most music lovers and audiophiles lack this special capability in critical listening, and as a consequence, art is routinely mingled with technology. In subjective equipment reviews, technical audio devices are often imbued with musical capabilities. Some are described as being able to euphonically enhance recordings, and others to do the reverse. It is true that characteristics of technical performance must be reflected in the musical performance, but it happens in a highly unpredictable manner, and such a commentary is of no direct assistance in our efforts to improve sound reproduction.
"In the audio industry, progress hinges on the ability to identify and quantify technical defects in recording and playback equipment while listening to an infinitely variable signal: music. Add to this the popular notion that we are all "hear differently," that one person's meat might be another person's poison, and we have a situation where are universally satisfying solution might not be possible. Fortunately reality is not so complex, and although tastes in music are highly personal and infinitely variable, we discover that recognising the most common deficiencies in reproduced sounds is a surprisingly universal skill. To a remarkable extent we seem to be able to separate the evaluation of reproduction technology from that of the program. It is not necessary to enjoy the program to be able to recognise that it is, or is not, well reproduced."
Cheers
