Are you troubled by the imaging of a symphony orchestra?

Harry Pearson once wrote that correct imaging is more important on recordings than in person, as with recordings you have no visual clues.

That being said, IMO there is no reason not to have pretty perfect left to right imaging of instruments. I think the only thing that can get in the way of that are loudspeaker resonances which may be present more than some think. Front to back is a different matter as that is where the recording art is (or is not) at its finest. Much multi-miking, for example, erases front to back imaging. The 3 mike techniques used in the early days by Everest, Mercury, RCA and Decca probably did it best. Credit Everest’s Bert Whyte for its early development.

A small exception is that in the earliest stereo days, notably at RCA, they recorded a full orchestra with only two microphones (before the stereo disk and initially headed for open reel tape) and a resolving system may reveal the so-called hole in the middle. And so they added the third microphone.

Orchestras, of course may have different seating arrangements even for different pieces. Split L-R violins, sometimes cellos in front on right, sometimes violas. Basses sometimes at extreme left, etc. Percussion can be anywhere.

PS: The Mercury Records engineer was C. Robert "Bob" Fine, not Donald.

@schubert 
Please share.  Which halls are these?

In New York the worst hall is Philharmonic Hall.  No one has ever said anything good about it.   They have redone it at least 4 times, never with much success.  They had recently planned to do a total tear out of the present hall and re-do it in a modern format (no proscenium and no seat very far from the stage) but they ditched that as they could not find a temporary alternative.  So it seems they will go forward with another half a-- fix, which is mostly ripping out the first few rows and moving the orchestra forward.

Carnegie is the world's most overrated hall IMO.  It has large balcony overhangs where the sound goes to die.  The hall also has many curved surfaces that focus the sound towards the middle seats and to the upper balcony.  Better sound there means compromised sound elsewhere.  There are those who think the center of the uppermost balcony contains the best seats in the house.   And at 3671 seats it is just too large.

The general acoustic state of concert halls in the US is not very encouraging--though there are exceptions.  Creating a great sounding concert hall should not be very difficult, really.  Just find one somewhere in the world that sounds great and copy it brick for brick.  But that's not something that adventurous architects and their civic promoters seem to want to do.