Actually, Focusrite have defined what ‘Air’ is,
Ahh… very good… They have defined the “Air” preamps as the sound character of the Focusrite ISA 110 preamp/EQ… A good reference if you know what the sound of a ISA 110 sounds like with a great microphone with a great cable… 
…
But what defines the sense of ‘air’ of any acoustic recording in any given environment, in the context of a single point microphone or multiple microphones capturing the acoustical energy?
[quote=“Agoldnear, post:22, topic:42037”]
the sound of a ISA 110 sounds like with a great microphone with a great cable
The sound of an ISA 110 with a great microphone and a great cable?
Yeah… The mic feed is the signal reference, where all subjective assessments of tonal quality are judged and the airiness of the synergy of all components in the signal path.
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I have a pretty clean and incisive DAC, a Chord Quest. I add a little air and sparkle with a tubed preamp that uses some incredible NOS 1962 Vintage Mazda Cifte 12AU7 Triode tubes. I also use some vintage EQ emulation plugins which adds some more character up top and to the bottom. Don’t forget that my ESLs bring a bit of speed to the transitions.
And now for a little air Vocal EQ cheat sheet: how to mix & EQ Vocals (2024)
Notice that the Air frequencies span from 10kHz to 20kHz and on up…
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Many of the best microphones have a built in tube preamp like the the Telefunkens and so many of its knock-offs…
I know the character of these microphones and preamps…
I define ‘air’ or ‘airiness’ as corollary to transparency and focus… The reference being the real-world auditory experience… The next level of this being in the recording chain reference from microphone to A/D encoding… In the playback chain, the construct of ‘air’ or ‘airiness’ must be juxtaposed to an experiential reference, just as in the recording monitoring experience… Because “being there or was there” is not a common experiential reference for most, the semantical and connotative meaning or definition of “Air” becomes quite ambiguous without common reference, and is highly subjective in nature, due to the myriad of influential biases that are always at play.
We can certainly say that some tube-character may imbue some ‘air’ into the playback audition on a given system… However, is this just a bias or an unveiling of the “airiness” captured in the recording and production process?
I am always juxtaposing my real-world experience with digitizing acoustic and electronic instruments and voices, at various sample-rates and with different ADCs with what I listen to through my reference playback system over headphones… There is no generally codified reference for what “More Air” really means. 
… The construct is much too vague…
I always wonder if your just an AI trained on spewing the same things you were trained on… Audio BS…
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Why do you say this? I think the term “More Air” is myopic at best…
It’s a very mainstream expression in the recording world of which you are so familiar.
It has a pretty specific meaning to us sound engineers, give it some air has been a common request in sessions, and the engineers know what is meant… how they obtain it is the ‘secret sauce’ of many studios…
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Just for fun take a look at the GML 8200 at Model 8200 – George Massenburg Labs
Notice that bands 4 & 5 go up to 26kHz… Now why would that be? Can you say air? Here is some of that “secret sauce”…
And if you look at Hendy Amps Michelangelo you will find that it actually has an EQ band named, you guessed it, Air… Michelangelo… More of that “secret sauce”…
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@reddog1 , @Ddude003
The connotative semantics of the term is contextual… In the context of the OP’s statement the common interpretation does not apply…
Here is the original statement:
I’m one that believes that airiness is synonymous with the transparency and focus of timbre and timbral spaciousness as recorded, and the transparency of this quality produced by any given DAC and associated playback components in any given playback system …
Timbre Definition:
PERCEPTUAL DISTANCE IN TIMBRE SPACE
Hiroko Terasawa , Malcolm Slaney , Jonathan Berger
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA)
IBM Almaden Research Center San Jose, California Department of Music, Stanford University Stanford, California
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a perceptual space for timbre, defines an objective metric that takes into account perceptual orthogonality, and measures the quality of timbre interpolation applicable to perceptually valid timbral sonification. We discuss two timbre representations and measure perceptual judgment. We determined that a timbre space based on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) is a good model for perceptual timbre space.
Here is an excellent reference recording from which to make assessments of any given DAC + playback system sound quality… It is recorded using a single microphone at 24/352.8kHz for those not capable of unfettered DSD playback.
Yeah, but you’re weird.
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Thanks! 
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Oh yea, the picture of a drum kit and what does it have to do with air… Overheads… So where do these cymbals frequency response come in at? How many mics does it take to properly record/track that drum kit? Where to cut and where to boost to get the most air? Is there life above 20kHz?
Ahh… I see now… trapped in the prison of certainty… Do yourself a favor and listen to the tracks of the recording “Cloud Song” and tell me that your connotative interpretation of “more airy sound” is a simple adjustment of frequency bias and that timbre of an instrument and the timbral spatiality of the environment don’t mean a thing and can be simply brought to life with some ‘character’ superimposed on the reality… Are you brave enough to challenge the status quo thinking you hold as certainty, by listening to this single-mic recording, where qualitative timbre of the instruments and timbre related spaciousness is indelibly imbued into the encoding of these performances. Tell me there is no airiness to reproduce and to perceive in these recordings without some overlay of EQ and electronics character beyond the recording chain employed in this production… Tell me that airiness is just a pile of high-frequencies to be boosted and manufactured… 
I have recorded drums with one mic… very succesfully…
For folks like me, who believe that an external DAC does not has to be anything else than a small converter box actually, the S.M.S.L SU-1 seems to be the device of choice. It costs 80 € or so.
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WOW.… There are no balanced outputs on this box…
Just wanted to mention in simple terms why I pointed out a DAC that didn’t do further processing of a feed that Audirvāna has upsampled to higher rate DSD:
Audirvāna allows a number of adjustments when upsampling. This permits you as the user to try different things and see what sounds best to you.
Many DACs don’t permit such a range of adjustments, they just overlay their own processing on whatever you feed them. If you find out after long listening you like that DAC’s sound, great. But if not, you’re stuck.
So that’s the reason I like DACs that allow me to use the range of options Audirvāna provides - I can find out which settings I like, rather than being stuck with one “flavor” whether I like it or not.
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