Great, but this has nothing to do with Octave recordings.
Only to the extent that you can manage a large space, but a small one is compromised. I suspect Grusin was recorded in his studio as that was the deal and it was his piano, so it had to be close mic, but it might have sounded more realistic if it had been recorded with mobile kit in a rented church.
Iām so excited. I canāt wait for the next update for my dac thingy.
I listened to the demo tracks to see what all the hullaballoo is about. The album sounds like you are seated at the piano and each octave is spread out more distinctly in stereo. I think that is totally cool and I like that notes are separate in space. The perspective does a good job presenting the music in a way that is clear, articulate, balanced, and full of body.
Personally, sitting way back in a concert hall listening to a distant instrument where I canāt hear the detail, harmonics, or stereo spread is not my cup of tea. 10/10 I prefer the musicians perspective, front row, or something even more immersive.
If you prefer the concert hall sound you can always sum this recording to mono (or close), filter off the bass and a little bit of the treble, and add a ton of hall reverb.
S****t is gonna make everything sound like itās in a Church, yo! 
Itās not nonsense. There are many recordings out there that sound very much like you are in a venue listening to the artists live. Predominantly, for me, these are Jazz recordings. If everything sounds fake to you, I really feel sorry for you. But donāt act like you know everything that anyone else hears and know better than they do. Because you donātā¦
Could you two possibly talk past one another more? 
It is like everyone reading knows what both of you intend, but you two donāt.
And - I have to say I share Ronās excitement. Though I may be disappointed if it is Windom Squared rather than SnowMassive-r. Or some as yet Unscaled peak.
I have no opinion as to what you enjoy or prefer. I keep telling you if you like the recordings you listen to and think they sound realistic this is good. I take no position as to what you happen to like.
Summary: I do not argue with othersā subjective judgments. Whatever you like, you like. I am not telling you what you hear or what you enjoy.
But I disagree with you. I have yet to hear, or make, a recording I would confuse with real. Recordings are a distant facsimile to the real thing at best, and they add artifacts with no analog in the real world. If you think they sound realistic, great.
This can be a bit hard to wrap oneās head around.
In any event, is the recording decent or better?
I think Andrew Everard basically said, forget the music, its serves as a very good audiophile test track, or a dozen test tracks that sound much the same. I think realism was the last of the problems.
Even complex recordings donāt necessarily take weeks. This superb recording of two big concertos, done last year at the BBC Maida Vale studios, was done start to finish in 3 days.
The Zimmerman - Solo II recording I referred to in the first place would require the hire of a decent sized local church (they have churches in Colorado?), the DSD recording equipment could fit in the trunk of a small car.
I wonder where Chesky recordsā¦sounds like large halls mostly, even with small groups.
I was amazed that they got a recording out of it at all. I listened to a bit of it out of curiosity.
It is one extreme of āLiveā issues, when the product really has nothing to do with what the audience hear, as it is close micād and probably heavily cleaned up as well.
The other extreme are things like this, which I also went to, the recording (on Qobuz) sounds very āliveā and has the slightly warm sound that you get at the Wigmore Hall.
When it came to Mozart, I came across my ticket the other day for the first of the Wigmore series that was on 27 September 2014 and the recording was done on 29 Sept to 1 October at Wyastone Estate (a concert hall that is part of Nimbus), so they obviously got in a car and motored over to Wales and recorded it whilst still hot. The sound is very similar in tone but the piano is clearly much more closely micād.
Personally the mic positioning in the live Beethoven recording (hung from the ceiling to a height of about 12 feet above them) is more preferable, not least because it is unquestionably closer to to the sound that you hear from the audience.
This is the mic position at Wigmore. It never changes as long as Iāve been going. They never use stage microphones.
Half right, he likes to record the instruments in a large hall, but he often records voices in āa closetā. The discontinuity of the resultant overlapping venues us always jarring to me.
I have difficulty believing that no one who has recorded there has used other than the House Mic position. Drawing a blank at the moment, but wasnāt/isnāt that where Nick Lowe would go to sing his songs to the room in preparation for recording an album? Or is my geography off?
Not āback in the dayā, as in Rockpile, but like Impossible Bird or thereabouts.
This makes sense. When singers are singing directly into the mic and the instruments are plugged into the board, one gets relatively little room sound, even if the sound of the performance is mushy.
The big advantages to flying mics is there is no floor bounce and the mics are equidistant from all of the performers. This helps greatly with balance, particularly with large ensembles. If you put hte mics in font, the performers in back are not heard well. Finally, the sound is not blocked by musicians playing behind someone in front who is blocking the sound.
Fascinatingly, our brains will process what we are seeing and fix our perception of balance. We will hear the performers in back much better than what the recording will capture. We are amazing listeners.
Thatās interestingā¦I mostly listen to instrumental music from Chesky, but I have to take care next time I listen to vocals.
I think the last vocal recently was Casey Abramsā¦I just put on the recordā¦his voice there also has reverbā¦but this one is a binaural dummy head recording, so maybe an exception.
Iāve often said recordings fundamentally fail because you canāt see whatās going on. Conversely, in baroque with a keyboard continuo, often brought forward in recordings, you often donāt notice the keyboard in performance as the sound does not travel and often it is played with the leaderās back to the audience do you canāt see the keyboard.
Iām multitasking. I have an eye on the cricket and listening to a livestream from last night at the Wigmore Hall - Schiff playing Bach. As he introduces each piece, you can hear more reverberation than normal, I presume due to the lack of 550 people in the room. The slightly drier sound is lovely.
He made the point that Bach on the keyboard is cantabile, it is meant to sing, it is not percussive, if you play percussive it bites back. Thatās quite a good clue as to how it should sound and how it should be recorded.
This ālive and uncutā stream Iām listening to is from the Wigmore Hall website off my phone by Bluetooth to a Bluesound Powernode 2i to my Raidho office speakers. Honestly couldnāt wish for better recording quality or sound.
Ehhā¦ not that there is none, but it is now delayed by the distance from the instruments to the floor-and-back, relative to the direct sound to the overhead mics, rather than the much shorter and blurrier multiple delay times bouncing off the floor when recorded from the front.
And the orientation of the entire reflective surface of the floor to the mics being more like a near-ish back wall.
The other piece of that being that the mics themselves are up in the room, changing not only their inherent floor bounce time, but also altering their relationship/balance to the ambient sound of the hall relative to the direct sound of the orchestra.
I used to wonder why there wasnāt a seat suspended in the air, with some ancient, wealthy partron with a smile on his face sitting in it.