To create an orchestra in a living room is quite a trick, and it can be done, but I suspect your Boxers are not up to the task. I've heard Nola speakers several times and have been mostly impressed, but in my experience, full orchestra takes big speakers in a big room.
I agree that the Boxers are limited at what they can do, but before I moved last year I had a dedicated sound room that had been acoustically tweaked over the course of 27 years and was using Thiel CS-6s pushed by an Audio Research VT-200 and while that was miles ahead of what I had now, it was nowhere near to what I heard yesterday either.
This is not to say that we cannot get our systems to sound very musical to the point that they can provide us with great listening pleasure at home, but the reality is that no matter how good we get it to sound at home, when you hear a top rate orchestra in a world class acoustic venue like Lincoln Center it makes you just shake your head and say boy we still have a long way to go.
Granted the scale and scope of a full orchestral performance make it the hardest to replicate and with simpler musical performances like string quartets or acoustic jazz combos we can get much closer, but as close as we get it is still just not the same as being there.
I can't tell you how many times I have settled into the listening chair and said to myself "Damn this is just like you are there" and that illusion holds up just fine, until you are actually there and you realize just how much is missing at home.
And none of this is meant in any way to put down anybody's system or say that our efforts are not worth while. Music in the home plays a very big and important part of my life. The practicality is that very few of us have access to live music on a regular basis. And I don't know about anybody else, but at $200 and up for prime seats, I certainly cannot afford to make a regular habit out of these kind of live performances. So we strive to do the best we can in our homes. I guess my original thought in posting this tread is that we as audiophiles tend to get smug over time about how good we have gotten our systems to sound. (myself included) And I don't mean that in a negative way, as we all put a lot of time and effort into setting up and tweaking our systems and have a right to be proud of (and enjoy) our accomplishments. With every step forward we take it sounds more and more like a real musical performance and I think sometimes after a while we end up benchmarking our systems not on what real music sounds like , but more on what what our system used to sound like and we become so focused on how far we have come that we lose sight of how far we still have to go.
This was really just meant to share an ah-ha moment that I had. I still intend to sit back and enjoy music on my system whenever I can, but yesterday's performance just reinforced in my mind just how good a real performance can sound and kind of recalibrated my standards of what good sound is all about.
