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A "someone actually playing in the room" comment which we could rephrase as "realism" depends largely on the experience of the listener with audio gear. If a listener is used to very basic gear, hearing an incrementally higher quality system is going to sound more realistic and might elicit such a comment.Hi
Hey Keith, just out of curiosity, would you say the 8cs, or any speaker you've ever listened to manage to reproduce music in a way that is essentially indistinguishable from a live performance?
There's an interesting review of the Hedd Tower Mains where they guy says a piano track was playing and he thought someone was actually playing the piano in the room. Sometimes my Type 20s give me a similar impression on vocals.
That said, I'm wondering if there is a speaker technology that has advanced to the point where the sounds is essentially indistinguishable from a live performance if you say walked into the room blindfolded and were asked to decide the sound was coming from speakers or from a live performer.
I have no data to back this statement up, but I imagine that in-room bass reproduction is particularly important to creating the illusion. Curtailed low bass will lead to a distinctly different sound (or feeling) to reality, especially with pipe organ music but also piano, cello etc. Boomy bass can easily be distinguished as a reproduction artifact. And of course, bass is predominately what you hear from another room. The bass performance of the D&Ds presents no issue here, though room correction needs to be checked.
At some point you get to a bit of a plateau in system performance where the most significant arbiter of quality becomes the recording. What I notice most listening to the D&Ds is enormous variability in the quality of recordings / mastering, and not any disturbing performance limitation of the speaker.