"However, do you, at least, admit that some LIVE performances do not sound LIVE at all?"

I have no idea what this means. How can something which is live not sound live? Each instrument
has a characteristic sound. You hear that sound as the result of vibrations which travel from the
instrument to your ears. Then you hear multiple reflections off of the surfaces of the room you are
in. That is the role the acoustic play in increasing your enjoyment of it. Sometimes acoustics are
excellent, sometimes they are poor. I don't know what else there is when you listen to live music.

"Even if we were present at every recording session, we would have no way of interpreting the

electrical information which feeds through the microphones to the master tape - let alone to the

resulting CD or LP - into a sensory experience against which we could evaluate a given audio

system."

I don't know what that means either. Microphones have known documented electrical and acoustical characteristics. They have different sensitivity pickup patterns, different electrical frequency
responses, different distortion characteristics all known and measured. At the current state of the
art there is no ideal microphone and no standardized method to make a recording. Even when
conscientious recording engineers try to make recordings which "document" a musical event,
different engineers will use different equipment set up in different ways and get different results.
Nobody knows how to accurately record the acoustics of a venue yet. And many recordings are
made in recording studios, not at the venues they would be heard at. So engineers do the best
they can with their equipment and their "art." And often the results are very good if not always
outstanding. It is true that some recordings will sound better on some sound systems than on
others. Too bad most so called audiophile equipment has designed out all facility to compensate
for differences in recordings so that the listener can adjust the system to perform optimally with
different ones. Human auditory nerves have electrical impulses which can be measured in response to various stimuli as well. You can measure the auditory nerve's electrical response to a saxophone playing middle C and you can measure its response to hearing a recording of the saxophone being played back through a sound system. Presumably if the electical response of the nerve is the same, the brain will interpret it in the same way and will recognize it as the same saxophone. To the degree it is similar the system is successful at reproducing sound. Whatever happens in between to get the job done is not important. What this has to do with the electrical information in microphones or on magnetic tape or the cd signal is beyond me. All I know is that if each step is optimized, the overall result will usually be the best obtainable and if there is a shorcoming in one step, it may be possible to compensate for it in another. Whatever this guy is trying to say, it makes no sense to me.