FT wrote..The ear adjusts quite rapidly for live performances - listening to a radio is quite an artificial experience, and you are subject to an enormous amount of compression that you are not aware of..

It would seem to me that you ears will not differentiate between 'live' and 'canned'. You are still hearing 'sound'. Surely the amount of compression (that you are not aware of), is for the benefit of getting the sound out of the speakers without distorting it. Obviously, a lot of people ARE aware of it,that's why there's so much written on the subject. We shouldn't forget that all these recording devices can also IMPROVE the recorded sound, of course, then it's not a true representation of the original. I wonder how much work has been done to the Joseph Taylor recording to make it transmittable on the BBC.