Now that we have much better tools to do that job, the only people who seem to be using them are radio journalists and people who record the sounds of the jungle, the ocean or thunderstorms. The stereo spectrum is used in recording studios now as a way to separate the instruments and vocals so they don't pile up on each other, but there is no spatial quality to the music when the panning knob on the mixing board is set to 30 degrees off center and your guitar is stuck there for the whole song. True Stereo involves a perception of depth like seeing with two eyes, and it does just what they said it did when they invented it. The word binaural is used to describe a technique of putting 2 mikes in a position that approximates human ears, though I personally use a wider range of mike placements, and often place them farther apart and pointing in more unusual directions. And they were right.
Problem is, almost nobody records with just a pair of mikes any more.
The classical music engineers used to use two mikes, then they went to multitracking and mixing and after trying it all, a lot of them are back to using two or three well-placed mikes. If your goal is to reproduce on tape the sound of something in real life, you can do an incredible job of it with two mikes and a digital recorder. I have done a good amount of experimenting with the 3-mike, so called Telarc technique which uses one omni mike and two directional mikes, and I find that for recording one or two people, it sounds much sharper and clearer to use a pair of mikes only. Perhaps when recording a bigger sound like a chamber orchestra the 3-mike method is better. If you are a singer and you move around ever so slightly while you sing into an X pattern miking configuration, the small motions you make will translate into much larger motions in a living room stereo setting, and your voice will move around the room rather than be locked in absolutely the same place in the stereo spectrum by the panning pot on the mixer.