The vast majority of the finest piano recordings available to us are reproduced and transferred very imperfectly, there's a lot of flutter and hiss. I have a Soviet recording of Gilels playing the Symphonic Etudes that is in D minor rather than in C sharp, as Schumann wrote and as Gilels played. There's audience cough etc. And yet it contains playing that makes impeccably recorded modern day interpretations very dull by comparison. Same with most recordings by Cortot or Gieseking or Schnabel or Arrau or Edwin Fischer, people who were not only singular artists but polymaths bathed in the tradition, who studied with Liszt's and Clara Schumann's students. There are qualities there that could never be reproduced by the gifted careerists of today, who all sounds exactly the same.
As Feltsman says here (between 1min and 2.30), it's nobody's fault but it's a different art form today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WwW...ssicalEnsemble