It's not an issue of solid state, or tubes, or CD, or SACD, or DVD-A, LP or even Cassette. Any of the current technologies can capture tonal accuracy reasonably well. The issue is much more basic - that of current recording capabilities, and this has little to do with solid state vs tubes.

The reason reproduced music cannot exactly duplicate the experience of live music is the scale and dimension difference between sound coming from two or more small sources (speakers) and many, many real instruments. Bt this I mean the physical size and the way the sound eminates from individual instruments cannot be duplicated acoustically by any means other than the sound coming from the instruments themselves - they way they disperse the sound into the concert all.

It is also because the natural acoustics of a real concert venue and "canned" acoustics (reverb) from a recording have vastly different spatial characteristics coming from either 2 or 5.1 channels verses coming from all around you from an infinite number of directions.

Binaural recordings can come extremely close to what a person would hear if transported to a concert hall. These recordings are made by "dummy" heads with microphones placed in the "ears". The resulting stereo recording is listened to through headphones. You should try to listen to one of these types or recordings because they can get scary-close to the virtual sound of actually being there. You can do a Google search of "binaural recordings" and turn up the limited number of available sources of these recordings. The method never really caught on - it was popular in the early 1950's when stereo was a new medium, but people didn't take to having to listen to their music through headphones exclusively, and binaural recordings sound terrible through speakers.

You can do an interesting experiment to prove to yourself the importance of the dimensional aspect of standard recordings. Play a recording of any number of channels, and listen to it from outside the room through an open door. This removes all the "dimentional" aspect of the sound presentation since it is coming from a single open door - a single source, just as it would be if musicians were playing in the room live. You will find that with many recordings, it actually will sound like the musicians are inside the room playing. If you enter the room, the illusion is destroyed to a degree because you are hearing the soundfield from just two (or 5.1) sources instead of from live musicians with their sound coming from many sources (their instruments).

The organ demo CD that I have circulated on this board is a good example. It is physically impossible with any practical number of channels to exactly duplicate the sound swirling around the listener inside that gigantic stone church with a pipe organ that has ranks of pipes in front and in the back of the listener. With even 5.1 channels this is impossible - with 100 channels it would be closer, but never exactly like being there. I've listened to this recording on every conceivable type of system, and none of them (even mine) come anywhere close to the totality of the soundfield created inside the gigantic chruch where I made the recording.

There are other reasons that a recording will not sound like live musicians, such as the fact that the reccording microphones are never placed where you would normally listen to the performance - they are always placed much closer. In some cases, the microphones are placed within inches of the instruments - you would never listen this close. All this is done to make the recording subjectively sound like a good representation of what you would "expect" to hear. Recordings made "literally" with the recording microphones placed in the concert hall where you would normally sit will sound very dull and lifeless when played on a system in your home.

There is also the issue of the frequency response of the microphones which usually have a reasponse peak in the high end to give the sound more "sparkle" than it would otherwise have (this is more true of microphones used to record popular music however). Again, if you were to not record this way, the recordings would sound very lifeless and dull in your home.

Recording is an art form in it's self, and the object is to give the subjective illusion of reality, rather than literal reality. There is really no such thing as a totally "purist" recording - there is always manipulation somewhere in the chain (either by microphone placement or by electronic processing and/or microphone choice) to transform the sound of the musicians and the recording space into a form that sounds "real" in your home, in a much smaller and acoustically different space than where the music was originally performed.

[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited May 14, 2004).]