[davidee]

Like most things in music there's a real distinction between technical perfection (tuning is one, rhythm another) and music feeling alive. It's why perfectly quantized rhythms and music sound lifeless.

Our perception of these things (for most, not all) is incredibly fluid, much like our perception of time. Music that moves us tends to have the right "technical imperfections". Too much and it comes off as amateur, too little, and it comes off as sterile.

Even on a production-level, the right amount of harmonic distortion/non-linearity can be a huge benefit to how sounds are perceived. The amount of soft-saturation tooling in modern electronic/in-the-box music production is wild. Almost every modern plugin seems to include some kind of "warmth" control now.

Yet another example how perfect reproduction doesn't sound quite right.