My daughter practing snare, bells this aft......

My JBL 4319 monitors have no problem reproducing very realistic bells, chimes, snares, cymbals, and the like. They employ Mag/Al tweeters and mid range drivers, nothing special. 

It could be in the providence of the recording, cabling, or maybe all it would take is a tweak or two to get you there.

All the best,
Nonoise

Acoustic Zen Adagio have crystalline highs , Just picked up a pair this afternoon and have spent the last few hours with them . Very impressive for $1300 on the used market .

+1 on the Adagios - their ribbon tweeter is exceptional on those highs!

My Reference 3A Veenas can also project those cymbal nuances with pinpoint accuracy.

ESL's.

Yes. Large ATC do,

However, few if any recordings sound like being close to someone practicing on a live snare in a domestic setting. Recordings are almost always compressed - especially snare. Live music is almost always more dynamic.

Try Sheffield Labs drum track test CD on your setup and see how close it sounds. 

Even better, the Sheffield Labs Track album on direct-to-disk LP. The CD was made from an analog recorder running at the same time as the d-t-d master was being cut on a lathe, straight from Doug Sax's mixing console.

Hard for any speaker system (well, within the reach of most mere mortal incomes) to pull off a truly realistic full band sound.

But for single instruments...

My MBL 121 omnis can be remarkable.  I have recordings of my son playing sax, my other son playing trombone, me playing acoustic guitar.

When I play these recordings at live sound levels, from just outside the room it can sound remarkably like someone in there playing a real instrument.

I fooled a few people that my son was in that room playing saxophone and they were amazed it was a recording.

I think if we are all being honest with ourselves, there is an immediacy and attack and clarity of live that systems just don’t quite capture. 
I think if some audiophiles actually heard some live instruments like this they’d complain that the sound was too bright! (even though it’s real!)

Maybe the providence of horns or panels?

Duke, that was a real honest answer - thank you. 

mr_bill
check out a Thiel Audio loudspeaker.  Happy Listening!

any of us recording much know the illusion falls short...

microphones are high distortion critters...

ah the human ear....

but this is our quest, no ?????

@tomic601 

Agreed that the recording is the limitation. Microphones are actually very good. The challenge is microphone placement! Drums sound different with less than a cm of microphone movement in any direction. Generally high overheads and a mix of close microphones works well but it is an art to get it to sound remotely like the real thing!

Drums also sound very different from the throne than from the audience. Sympathetic snare resonance can plague the drummer at the throne but audiences actually hear very little because of the way sound is projected.

For the very high frequencies (bells, triangles, cymbals, etc.), I stand by ESL’s or ribbons. For drums themselves, planar-magnetics, especially the Magneplanar Tympani T-IV and T-IVa (the best reproduction of my own Gretsch drumset), and perhaps the new MG30.7.

I have a pretty good CD recording of Tibetan Bowl Music and an actual Tibetan Bowl for compares. Sounds convincing on my main setup. A different kind of sonic treat...

We had a full drum set in house as well for many years.   Nice reference test!

Tubes and horns or hi eff. like voxativ