Microphones and playback quality have come a long way
The technology has come a long way (or at least some way in the case of microphones), but we still deal with the choices that recording engineers make. Recording microphones are not flat, they are treated as musical instruments -- whether you chose a mic from Shure, Rode, Audio Technica, Blue, AKG, Neumann, Beyerdynamic, etc, they all color the sound in different ways that sound pleasing to when exposed to different sounds. If a microphone is chosen because it has a nice low/mid frequency boost that makes accentuates a male speaking voice, it's not surprising that a female voice may not sound as pleasing when using the same recording setup.
The reason that we don't use "flat" microphones (a measurement microphone for example) for recording is that they basically sound terrible to the casual ear. There's a demo on the Stereophile test CD that demonstrates this (if you can find it).
It's just that the article is mostly talking about AM radio, and they'd be dealing with stuff like 1920s carbon mics. So maybe modern mics could still be causing issues if they're chosen for a specific male voice type, but it's a stretch to apply 1920s data directly to the modern day. Everything's still a lot more accurate overall.
Why wouldn't flat response through 20 kHz sound like the performer is in the room with you? Are these mics compensating for speakers that also don't have flat response?
The directivity of a microphone (no matter the pickup pattern) is not the same as the human ear so it either picks up or leaves out sounds that human ears would normally hear.
The technology has come a long way (or at least some way in the case of microphones), but we still deal with the choices that recording engineers make. Recording microphones are not flat, they are treated as musical instruments -- whether you chose a mic from Shure, Rode, Audio Technica, Blue, AKG, Neumann, Beyerdynamic, etc, they all color the sound in different ways that sound pleasing to when exposed to different sounds. If a microphone is chosen because it has a nice low/mid frequency boost that makes accentuates a male speaking voice, it's not surprising that a female voice may not sound as pleasing when using the same recording setup.
The reason that we don't use "flat" microphones (a measurement microphone for example) for recording is that they basically sound terrible to the casual ear. There's a demo on the Stereophile test CD that demonstrates this (if you can find it).