Thanks for the gratuitous insult. Perhaps it speaks more about you than I.
I think you misread my post. Sorry for being unclear, I was trying to be ironic. I was not trying to insult. I think your premise is sound.
I never understood the term 'absolute sound' in the day. I eventually came to believe it was artificial in order to generate a subjective standard presided over by HP so that he could be the grand anointer and dethroner of audio gear. He was successful in that regard, but the standard is so illusory as to be meaningless.
I have heard on a couple of occasions a session being recorded, then played back through an audio system. I could barely hear myself what the microphones heard, and the live vs. recorded was diametrically different. Those were simple sessions without the subsequent interventions of mastering gear to further confuse the process, much less the limitations of microphones, recording gear etc. A common complaint from musicians is that recordings never sound like their own instruments to their ears.
All stereo systems sound different. every piece of equipment sounds different, every phono cartridge sounds different, all the permutations sound different. Even if people were present at the recording venue, they would all be in different seating arrangements hearing different things at the same session. Things can’t be that different across the board and then be compared to an imperfectly perceived and remembered original.
There are also recordings that probably allow a better perception of the music played than actually being present at the performance. Maybe the standard should be reversed, and the question should be why don’t more live performances sound as good as the comparative home recordings played on high end equipment.
So I do blame HP for generating a persistent apocryphal standard. In an article of his that I read he was reviewing a record played in a hall he was familiar with, and he was actually reviewing the equipment based on how well it rendered the 3D image of the hall according to his aural memory. I thought he was either sincerely deluded or he was just spinning it. Differentially placed microphones and mastering anomalies would assure that there could be no meaningful comparison to begin with.