Venues have massive power and resonation problems within their equipment. I can hear it, you can too; you just don't know it unless you've played with conditioning and resonation dampening.
Unfortunately the guys that work on this stuff only use isolation transformers, if anything. They're better than nothing, but they aren't going to close the gap difference between a venue and your home. Not only that, no one has any sort of power treatment for instruments on stage!
When I've had bands plug into one of my conditioners interesting things happen. There's more headroom to the point where guys playing riffs on their guitars are utterly shocked at how much more space they have to play in; I've watched the expression on their face, one of surprise you got so much more! The sound becomes much more hair-raising. From a sound man's position, get this, it's reduced the compression required for mic'd guitar amplifiers
by half.
The only dudes around that don't deal with nearly as many problems are weirdo's like Andrew Bird who has his own PA of custom horns that he doesn't prefer to be mic'd.
Your description reminds me of the sound at 2014 Denver RMAF in one vendor's room (sorry unknown vendor but no other vendor remotely fits this description): big awesome TT > tube phono/preamp/power amp > TAD CRM1 pair. Program was Beatles mono and sound was the best I ever heard. It was like each member of the Beatles played just for me. I never before had so much sense of experiencing 50 year old musical history. You have no idea what sounds like the Beatles till you hear this. Huge wall of sound, a gorgeous hemisphere, with dynamics reminding me of Tower of Power in The Record Plant studio playing a live direct mic feed to the control room.
Obviously no stereo imaging, but still possibly the best reproduced sound I ever heard. Go figure. Do not miss that demo if you have a chance. I was shocked the other guys listening seemed less impressed. $2k mono cartridge but seemed well worth it.
TT disc jockey said this Beatles mono LP was cut with a stereo cutting head because no mono cutting heads available at the time. He said new version coming cut with a mono head, with improved dynamics. Wow.
It's worth it to get a TT just to play the Beatles mono. It's that good, really. The $100k DCs Red Book rig doesn't touch this source. Now I know what Art Dudley's talking about.
James, that's very hard to do inside! But you know what can radically change the aspect? Setup a stereo outside!
At my grandfather's eulogy the only stereo equipment available was some stuff I had coincidentally that I was giving to my father, and some of the pieces of my grandfather's stereo I built for him. The DAC was PD's, so it was top-notch (I don't recall which amp atm). The speakers were Hawthorne OB's. Now on any given day inside a building those speakers couldn't hold a spark from flint, let alone a candle to the speakers you heard. But when you go outside...
WTF, where the hell is Frank Sinatra at, I hear him, but I don't see him? It was a bigger, more concert like representation than I've ever heard from any stereo. They got loud, like uncomfortable loud later when playing some other tunes. Since then I've always wanted to go out to the "ranch" as it's named now and do an a little retreat of outside listening with those speakers again. The experience of getting shivers as notes come out of his mouth er... CD. I've never even been to a concert that had that kind of clarity and clear bigger than life presence.
