Originally posted by Jeremy
drummers....tune their instrument. 
Sorry.....logic error....does not compute
I don't actually agree that a cymbal sounds horrible, although I agree good reproduction doesn't really aid easy and or background listening.
I guess having asked the question, I need to answer it myself. I think the thing I'm most sensitive to is hi-fi's sins of comission above sins of omission, i.e. I'd prefer for it not to introduce obvious distortion than to fail to capture the genuine leading edge. And I really don't want to be reminded with every note that it's coming from a magnet and a bit of paper, rather than a bit of wood and dead cat. Shoving a load of tizz around strings, cymbals, piccolos etc does more to destroy the enjoyment of music for me than any loss of dynamics/attack. Of course I
want both.
So my priorities that contribute to musical enjoyment in descending order are:
1) Lack of tizz around highish-frequency notes
2) Vanishing speakers
3) Dynamics
4=) Clarity
4=) Spatial layout
6) "Timing"
So for me the sound of a cymbal addresses 1 and 4, so is a fairly good test - although a violin section is a tougher test for me, as a) I'm more familiar with its sound and b) it is a far more dominant sound in the music I mainly listen to.
But IMO the real life in music comes from the performance - a great performance on a crappy system will give me more enjoyment than a crap performance on the best system in the world - and this is where I do get sensitive to timing and subtle dynamics. There is of course a spectrum here - some will much prefer stunning performances recorded in the 1920s over good ones from nowadays, even though the sound is rubbish, and others will only be happy with the top quality recordings from Reference Recordings or Chesky or... - but I'm somewhere in the middle, give me a very good performance from the last 30 years and I'm happy.
This is veering more to the "ambinence" thread, but I made and interesting observation last night: I've been waxing lyrical about how fantastic this new amp is, but after being at a concert of Haydn played on period instruments last night, I came home and played something similar...and it was soooo far off - mainly in the clarity and cleanness of the instrumental sound, but there was still a little tizz around the strings.
I'm not sure whether the attributes of a system that plays classical superbly well will also be equally good at playing jazz, rock or dance/techno - I can't see any reason why not - but I'm pretty sure than the compromises required to meet a budget will result in a different system lower down the food chain.
