I played in many orchestras and jazz groups and my preference is to participate in creation of the music and the sound is quite awesome from this vantage Point.
Most sound you hear from your system is heavily produced and subject to substantial manipulation by the sound engineer. The quality variations are quite extreme and you never know what's been done to it. My personal view is that sound quality for a lot of recorded classical music is not that terrific. It's very good but lacks the openess that is most desirable.