The word realism is a fancy word, the eager reviewers use fancy vocabularies to spice up their stories. It has everything relating to their livelihood, there's a distinction between passion and livelihood. Oxford dictionary defines realism as the quality or fact of representing a person or thing in a way that is accurate and true to life while Macmillan dictionary, a way of making something seem real.
For me, realism as in a fidelity context opens to wild interpretations. To get to the bottom of it, we must first define the components in the music. There are tonality, rhythm, and dynamic that made up music. Music is not music without any of them. A sound without tone is noise. A sound without rhythm is a chant. A sound without dynamic is a boring music. Tonality, also known as tone color has everything to do with notes and octaves to express the artists' creations. The best audio policy is to let the music flows. Music ideally to remain intact, no elements are to be added nor subtracted. There are cases where we need technology to attain the desired loudness in spite of second best choice. Rhythm is the tempo while the dynamic is the loudness-time modulation as written in the score. The score sheet dictates all three elements. The higher the scorecards, the greater the music, the greater the fidelity, the more real the sound gets. But for the larger non-audiophile, an emotion connection is what audio is about, the music takes its course to the ears even it is through subpar electronic/speakers. Gramophone is the perfect example.
Having said so, some systems convey the realism better than the others. The mother of all issue is the setup skills. Poor setup skills can ruin a world class system, it is so easy to screw up a system. A good setup skill can turn a mediocre system to a fairly good system. In many cases, we hold our silence seeing a poor system set up because people do not like to looked stupid. I used to think that the white people are flat-out honest with their opinions but, they are some smooth talkers. They do not give straight answers but with replies that have you made your own conclusions. This is the art of speaking at best. An overly smooth and rounded delivery though sounds pleasing, it is not for me. It bores me to the bones especially those systems that could not deliver a reasonable tone contrast.
