Your reply suggests you didn't fully grasp my point. Using your baby analogy, it can't be thrown out with the bathwater if it doesn't exist. So I definitely am not throwing any baby out.
The neurological components that get used when attending a live music performance are not the same neurological components that are used to listen to recorded music at home. Neurologically speaking, it's like tuning to a different communication channel, not just from FM1 to FM2, but from FM to being chased by elephants to floating in space. You can't 'build' the former out of the latter components. It's like trying to build a bicycle out of mechanical clock parts: the best you can do is something really poor, whereas you could have used those parts to make a really good mechanical clock. It's the wrong goal. It has nothing to do with purity: it is just the wrong idea altogether.
The only reason we think it is the right idea, is because we misunderstand how the mind creates experiences. When we are listening to music at home, we create a listening-to-music-at-home experience, as a unique thing in itself. We can maximize the qualities of that, or we can muck it up by refusing to acknowledge its unique truth and trying to make it something else. What purist would want that?
Once the purist realizes the truth (that even a perfect reproduction of the sound waves hitting the ears in the live venue, into the ears at home, will be experienced as something clearly deficient at home, and can actually be produced as something that works better for the at-home listener by producing it in a different way), then they can be a purist to that. That's me.
And good recorded music producers need to recognize this. Some definitely do, especially in classical: they develop each product (each recording) by maximizing its qualities on its own terms as an at-home listening experience, and using their skill to best communicate musically for that situation. They know, from experience, that putting a mic where the listener sits and nothing else will NOT communicate what they, and the musicians, wanted to. And they know what will do a better job. Being purist to that idea is better IMO.
Sadly IMO, one or two labels pander to the misguided notions of audiophile purists on this topic. Same labels have been seen boasting of their use of analog tape recorders, or DSD not PCM, and for the same reason: give 'em what they ask for.
cheers
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