I attend over 50 acoustic concerts a year and I hear harpsichord and piano played in my house. I agree there is something wrong with the audio ecology. I rarely "image" when listening to speakers and when I do it is flat - that is, the emphasis on left-right illusion reduces the height illusion.
OTOH I have heard remarkable timbral accuracy from reproduction and I think it does correlate to "air" in systems like Gamut, Thiel, Earthworks and Lipinsky - tweeters with "ultrasonic" capability, but no metal resonance. Further, when I am impressed with reproduction a lot of my peers consider it "harsh".
To me there are few recordings with accurate spatiality and timbre. Most of what I listen to is either European boutique classical labels (BIS, AliaVox, Harmonia Mundi, etc.), audiophile like Chesky, Mapleshade and Jon Marks or select jazz producers like Carl Jefferson and Manfred Eicher. The recording quality comes through on mediocre systems - my living room for example is set up with plastic cabinet B&W DM305 and B&K AV2500, a chip based "contractor" amp!
Recording technique - I prefer near-coincident pair - seems to matter more to suspension of dis-belief than listening to, for example, a Rudy van Gelder production on my Ayre AX-7 driving Tag-McLaren Calliopes.