As I don't have thousands of dollars worth of stage speakers, amplifiers and audio equipment, there's a very noticable difference in sound quality between live shows and recorded music, depending on the venue.
You're also missing out a pretty big part of live shows, there's a difference between hearing a musician play a song live vs a recording. A recording is almost never one single take straight through and, depending on the artist, can be a fairly different rendition of the song.
An example, last concert I went to was cypress hill, they had a different DJ with them that mixed their tunes up pretty differently so the performance was.nothing like listening to one of their albums.
For some bands, I'd actually disagree with that. Both what they are playing is better, and their released material is compressed to hell and back[1], which seems to be less prevalent live (though far from gone).
No doubt they _could_ do that recorded (anything you can do live you can match in a studio), but they _aren't_ doing.
There's also the non-musical elements - there's a difference between just playing some music and putting on a show.
So vinyl masters often (but not always) avoid the loudness war and have a wider dynamic range.
I suspect you mean the latter, though with modern audio tech, well-mic'd and mastered recordings can easily sound ... if not better, then more intense, than live performances.
Though there's nothing like seeing the music being performed live.
To me a philharmonic concert sounds... very different than recorded audio. I'm confident I can double-blindly 100% tell the difference. And so can everyone else. This is one experiment I'd be happy to participate in.
And the obvious difference: live 'rock' etc. is still coming through speakers.
> To demonstrate the veracity of Lyngdorf's "Is it real, or is it Memorex" claim, Birkelund invited the trio to begin performing. After playing for what felt like, at most, 30 seconds, the musicians began to fade out as the volume of a pre-recorded track of the same music was turned up. Although the much too short demo left many in the room a gasp at how remarkably close the live trio and tuned-to-the-room system sounded, Birkelund failed to mention that the Model D system was never silent.
https://www.stereophile.com/content/steinway-lyngdorfs-elega...
It's similar in some sense to the reasons why people go to see live concerts. The sound quality isn't better, it's just different, and feels "more real", although for concerts it is also helped by the fact that you're actually there.