Same tired old incredible mantra.
I can only conclude that you've been "amazed, many times over the years," by your imagination, or that you've never actually recorded music live from your seat with a portable cassette recorder and you're just making this up to amuse yourself. Because when you do make such a recording, and your system "absolutely, absolutely gets out of the way," what is revealed are the extreme limitations of the media and the recording methodology you've described. I believe the soul is in the performance, not the reproduction. But this is a case in which bad recording technique onto bad media may very well create so much noise that Muddy Waters' soul may be hard to feel.
And the problems are fundamental. You cannot tweak them away.
Tim
If you've never experienced the phenomenon, I can certainly appreciate that one would say the above. After all, your point of view makes perfect sense. Except that the human organism is not "sensible",
is able to make leaps of cognition.
The point is, that even though the recording technology is primitive, that the crucial elements of the performance are still picked up by the microphone, and transferred to the media. Yes, it is buried many times under a lot of noise and distortion generated by the low quality electronics; but the the information is still there. To get it back out again you rely on the most powerful filtering mechanism in your arsenal: the human mind.
This "component" in the listening chain is the most powerful, but also the most temperamental: if it overloads, because it has insufficient information, or the layering of distortion is too great, then it gives up, the recording is unlistenable to.
You made a key point in your reply: the soul is in the performance -- exactly so! But you have to be able to "hear" that performance to appreciate it, which means pushing aside mentally all the muck contributed by the poor recording, adjusting your focus to bypass the artifacts of the recording and zooming in, so to speak, on the musical content. Hells bells, even Steve talks of this, calls it "active listening".
Now, for a "bad" recording, on a poor system, this
will be hard work! Fatigue, and loss of interest will set in almost immediately. But, and this is a huge but, if you get the replay working at the highest level, then the elements of the musical performance, and the mess that is everything else become sufficiently differentiated in tonality, as good a word as any to call it, for your mind to separate the two quite easily; the focus is no big deal, and "passive" listening is sufficient to extract what your mind wants, to be aware of the "soul".
This is why I say to use "bad" recordings to test systems: the difference, subjectively, can be amazing between on song and not so ...
Frank