One’s perspective of what constitutes “real live sound” can be different depending on one’s circumstance - and all can be true.
For symphony orchestra listeners, it isn’t just what seat in the house you like to sit in. We who play in orchestras are right in the midst of the action, and acclimated to that sound. I play hundreds of professional orchestra concerts a year, and am lucky to get to go to one. It is probably why 60s Columbia recordings with all their myriad close mics picking up the bows’ rosin, the clarinets breath escaping the reed, and the horn’s spit splaying out the mouthpiece, sound very much ‘correct’ to me. That is my milieu and my baseline for judging orchestral recordings (I miss John McClure’s aesthetic for producing orchestral recordings).
I suppose I also belong in the camp that ANY recording is a synthetic creative product, and never an actual exact representation of the live event (like Glenn Gould), as opposed to the “2 or 3 mics in the prime spot of the hall” crowd (although many of those recordings sound fantastic!). So why bother fighting this reality?
In other words, the whole “high fidelity” concept is a product of it’s original time, back in the 50s when it was very difficult to acquire equipment that was not fraught with technical problems. We might just live in “post hi-fidelity” times.