@amey01
When I started my musical journey into high fidelity I was a teenager with a home build speaker system with expensive drivers and a home build power amplifier from a Popular Electronics magazine. All my friends were impressed on how close to real female vocals were. I remember one instance where I was playing "Never my Love" by The Association.
In most case it is an individual song recorded properly.
I have to say that no multi-tracked, multi-miked recording will ever sound real. When i got my electrostatic speakers I found the only recording that were close to real sounding, were direct to disk Sheffield recording. The most outstanding and suspect that this is even by today are the "Harry James" Big Band recordings. First time I heard them I got goosebumps. You could hear the room reverberation, localize the position of the instrument FRONT TO BACK, something seldom heard. Anyways check those out. I have the LPs, the CDs and they are available on Amazon music.
Other than that, I came to the conclusion, even though there are highly respected artists making the music, commercial recording were and still are crap when compared to REAL. I bough the very high performance Technics RS1500 back then and started to record my own using a single stereo microphone. There are many articles that explain how a single stereo microphone will preserve the phase relationships that give localization of the instrument, and an electrostatic speaker that is by design phase coherent will do an amazing job. The most realistic recordings I made were recording a small pipe organ and a choir in a small church with wonderful acoustics.
When digital recording became popular, their claim to fame other that infinite life (not really true) and dynamic range. The latter promise has been completely destroyed in the last 20 years. But back them when this was a thing, Telarc came out with recordings that lived up to that promise. While musically they may not be so stellar, but if you want the acoustic wind to blow your hair around, try any of their orchestral recordings. The other small label was DMP, but you may not like their music. Their was one specific cut on a CD, I can't remember the title, but is surely impressed my friends, It starts of with the sound of one of those small wind-up toys that make music. This small sound and the ambience of the original acoustic space and realism, you could swear that this toy was just hiding behind your speakers, then the high intensity sound of the band playing is enough to knock you out of your seat. If you play it at the proper volume level, the music peaks are guaranteed to drive your amp into clipping. Today the problem is that people use music as background and you can't sell recording like that anymore.
