Well it might be that people were fooled by their eyes on that one.
I'm kind of thinking it's more like the movie example. There is a partial two-dimensionality to the playback of music even with good imaging etc. When you hear live music (not amplified) there is a spaciousness to it and perhaps lots of different reverberations. Even with amplified music, the drums usually can be heard separately and sometimes the bass or guitar if they are playing with stacks loudly rather than mainly being amplified by the PA. There is also compression with playback and the almost too perfect mix.
I attend a lot of unaamped live music and the very best recordings on the very best systems can get fairly close, but not 100% convincing. And if you move out of the sweet spot a lot of the imaging and subtle queues collapse.
I've learned to be more philosophical about the fact that hifi will probably never reproduce live music perfectly. In fact, there's a very cool silver lining with hifi. And that's that it can produce music and performances that are impossible live. If you look at modern pop music (or electonica, or any other music that's 'produced' in a studio), this is music that's completely constructed (artificial), but still very interesting and cool.
I look at it the same way I look at movies. A great projector can not convince me that I am looking out a window in a photo-realistic way. But it CAN show me things that I will never, ever see outside my window. Namely, futuristic space stations. Zooms. Cuts. Astonishing special effects. Cinema doesn't look like real life, but that's OK, it has it's own 'language' so to speak, and can do things with that language that I would never get by walking outside my front door.
Hifi is the same way - it can show you wondrous things, some of which will never exist outside a recording studio creation. That's not something to lament, it's something to celebrate.