This is a very simplistic view of things, on many fronts, but I'll try to be as concise as possible.
In a classical wind/bow orchestra, there are more harmonics at play than the 20Hz-20KHz band, and these harmonics affects our perception of the sound and soundstage. However, recreation of this is very hard, because you need both recording and playback chains which can handle these harmonics as well.
To faithfully reproduce such orchestra, you need a speaker for every instrument, ideally with the exact air movement capacity of the instrument you're mirroring. This is not practical. Instead we mic all of them, mix all of them, and add room echo to the mix to capture harmonics as best as we can.
However, this can't replicate some instruments anywhere around its real sound.
Examples are Turkish qanun [0] and Chinese guzheng [1]. These instruments sound bland, flat and shallow on all recordings, but listening them live, directly with your ears is a goose pimlples inducing experience. Higher end stringed instruments have a similar vibe to them.
So, a 16bit/44KHz signal at 20Hz-20KHz band cannot reproduce these instruments with any faith.
Standard CDs, high quality vinyls, lossless files carry a lot of information, but not all information we can process with our ears. Like how even the best digital cameras cannot reproduce the colors we can see with our eyes.
Reaching these resolution levels are neither cheap, nor practical, hence we use what's practical.
As a result, your master-pressed-vinyl possibly can't carry this information either, because the recording chain was not able to capture that amount of information, even if you went all the way to install your own power pole to feed clean power to your impossibly expensive audio equipment with all that capacity to reproduce that sound.
IOW, you can't extract the sound which is not there to begin with.
Your friendly ex-orchestra player reported from its AKAI-AM2850.
It has never been clear to me what the goal of home playback is supposed to be.
Let's simplify from a full orchestra to just a solo piano. Is the goal
1. to sound like it would if that piano was being played in my living room, or
2. to sound like what I'd have heard if I was there in the concert hall sitting in a good seat when the recording was made, or
3. to sound like what it would sound like if a replica of my living room was built inside the concert hall but with walls that do not transmit sound, with my speakers replaced by speaker-sized holes in the wall behind where the speakers normally sit, and I was sitting in that replica living room during the concert?
Normally, it’s “2”. Music is mastered to transfer you to the place where it’s recorded. Mastering is just tuning the sound to fit into your music system limits, while keeping the atmosphere as much as possible.
ABBA’s sound is mastered to fit into AM radio and jukeboxes for example. To make the music broadly listenable, for example.
Today everything is so blurry, because there’s no studio per se. It’s just sequenced, vocal is added, mastered, compressed and released (today’s pop). Rock and other stuff is still track recorded, tho.
I worked in guitar audio effects for a while (the exact opposite of this discussion), but I started playing with stereo guitar rigs and then thought about three speaker setups and beyond.
At a certain point the speakers really start to interfere with each other and you have to worry about the stability of the image at each point in the room...
It occurred to me at that point that you're really starting to approach 3. You're trying to recreate the sound pressure patterns within the room.
That's about the point I moved on to something simpler. Granted my explorations were super simple, but it was a VERY weird thought that got me thinking about the question you've asked.
This is a very simplistic view of things, on many fronts, but I'll try to be as concise as possible.
In a classical wind/bow orchestra, there are more harmonics at play than the 20Hz-20KHz band, and these harmonics affects our perception of the sound and soundstage. However, recreation of this is very hard, because you need both recording and playback chains which can handle these harmonics as well.
To faithfully reproduce such orchestra, you need a speaker for every instrument, ideally with the exact air movement capacity of the instrument you're mirroring. This is not practical. Instead we mic all of them, mix all of them, and add room echo to the mix to capture harmonics as best as we can.
However, this can't replicate some instruments anywhere around its real sound.
Examples are Turkish qanun [0] and Chinese guzheng [1]. These instruments sound bland, flat and shallow on all recordings, but listening them live, directly with your ears is a goose pimlples inducing experience. Higher end stringed instruments have a similar vibe to them.
So, a 16bit/44KHz signal at 20Hz-20KHz band cannot reproduce these instruments with any faith.
Standard CDs, high quality vinyls, lossless files carry a lot of information, but not all information we can process with our ears. Like how even the best digital cameras cannot reproduce the colors we can see with our eyes.
Reaching these resolution levels are neither cheap, nor practical, hence we use what's practical.
As a result, your master-pressed-vinyl possibly can't carry this information either, because the recording chain was not able to capture that amount of information, even if you went all the way to install your own power pole to feed clean power to your impossibly expensive audio equipment with all that capacity to reproduce that sound.
IOW, you can't extract the sound which is not there to begin with.
Your friendly ex-orchestra player reported from its AKAI-AM2850.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanun_(instrument)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guzheng