I've been saying the same thing as long as I can remember, in terms of the difference I percieve between live instruments vs what I hear through most hi-fi systems. I'm an absolute tone/timbre fanatic. I LOVE listening to different types of speakers, but when it comes to something I'd like to own, that causes me to actually want to just sit and listen to the music/sound, it's very rare I encounter something compelling. Because most audio reproduction falls so short of the real thing to me it sounds timbrally black and white.
I remember when this hit home most vividly for me in the 90s. As a budding audiophile who'd already at that time literally driven around parts of Canada and the USA to audition tons of different speakers, I had a chance to sit down, solo, in a room and play a bunch of my test tracks on the gigantic Genesis 1.1 speakers in a very large room. I put on a well recorded track of symphonic music sat back and closed my eyes. I was overwhelmed by the most convincing sense of size and scale I'd ever heard from loudspeakers, playing symphonic music. I could really imagine an orchestra playing before me - the clarity, soundstage, dynamics! But it wasn't long before I became bummed out over what was missing: any realistic sense of timbre/tone. The fact the presentation came so close to the real thing in all other regards seemed to make what was missing stick out like a sore thumb. The instruments sounded like they'd been stripped of color, black and white. Sort of like a real orchestra where all the instruments had been replaced with plastic replicas. As I was used to attending the symphony often at that time, luxuriating in the richness of real instrumental tone, the disparity seemed stark. I left disappointed, wondering "Damn, those speakers were essentially end-of-the-line for current speaker technology. And tonally, did I just learn that it's a dead end, at least for the aspect of sound I cherished most?"
What I've found, at least as I've perceived it, over the years is that while I haven't found a sound system that reproduces the richness of the real thing, some systems strike me as at least *more* like the real thing than others. Every speaker system seems to homogenize, but some seem to have a tone that generalizes somewhat more towards what I hear in real instruments.
Ideally blinded live vs reproduced experiments would help give some solid objective evidence telling us if one speaker design was able to sound closer to the real thing. But not many of those around it seems. And given speakers are compromised in their ability to reproduce instruments/voices perfectly, many of us pick our compromises based on our own criteria, built over time, for what "sounds real" to us.
Reminds me that my friend, who has been reviewing gear including tons of speakers, for decades, now has the Klipsch La Scalas in his home.
He talked about the various ways they are colored, deficient, can't image with much precision etc. Nonetheless, they leave him with more of an impression of hearing "live musicians playing" than any other speaker he's had in his home.