wrote in message
oups.com

Hehe... Arny, I like you; you're a literal as I am. :-) You're
right, to get every nuance of say, a solo violinist, you would want
several microphones picking up all of the hamonics, the player's
breathing, the rustle of his/her clothing, the fingers on the
fretboard.

Actually the several mics would be more likely required to capture the fact
that the energy given off by a violin player varies considerably along the
ordinal directions.

Of course in a live performace you'd have to be
nose-to-nose with the player to hear all that.

????

OK OK, I give...
let's get realistic. :-) I don't want "in-your-face" as much as I
want "in the audience."

My point is that what you really want is what you want, when you want it.
One time you may want in-your-face and another time you may want
in-audience-over-here and then the next time you might want in-the-audience
over there. The methodology I outlined might possibly deliver such a thing.
It seems to me that little else would.

I think what I meant to say by "assume as perfect a recording as
possible" is just that. Assume that I have found the best recording
available of what I want to listen to. This may be a 5.1 Dolby
DVD-Audio recording, or a mono vinyl LP (yes, I still have my Dual 502
turntable!). I don't want the sound system to add or subtract
anything from what the recording engineers created. How's that? :-)

Without begging the point, what you might want is a system largely composed
near-field monitors.

Are there any web sites that have suggestions/recommendations of
setups for people who desire to hear a certain kind of sound,
hopefully bracketed by budget levels?

In all of our dreams...

Thank you MINe for the stereophile.com suggestion.

Stereophile is overtly dedicated to audio's high end, as in the high priced
segment of any particular product segment. IOW in the produce segment area
of near-field-monitors they have posted reviews of expensive near-field
monitors (e.g. Genelec), but not good inexpensive ones (e.g. Behringer).