Live or reproduced?

Once you hear the real deal it's almost impossible to go back. Such was the experience I had relayed to you in yesterday's Paul's Post. It hadn't taken me long to raise my standards of what music sounds like as reproduced by the extraordinary planar midrange and tweeter drivers of the FR30. Newley recorded cymbals shimmered and sounded as if they were in the room. The stark differences between that live performance sound and then hearing it played on conventional driver designs was a literal slap in the face. One sounded real, the other a contrived version pointing to itself. "I am a tweeter." Until that moment I had never had that stark of an experience. I think what really helped was also having the recording, mixing, and mastering facility in the same vicinity and as part of the same process. Even with all this newfound clarity and realism I still haven't answered the original question. How can we know the proper placement of a microphone if we must rely upon the accuracy of a loudspeaker or headphone for verification? I wish I had a magic answer, but I don't. Best I have is to go where we're now going. Monitoring and listening on the most accurate transducers possible. It won't be perfect but dang if it doesn't get us closer.