I'd take it from a different angle - those worried about "fidelity" that don't play instruments and have never worked on a studio recording simply have no idea what they're talking about. They latch on to numbers because numbers are easy to understand, and bigger == better, right?

After engineering/producing a bunch of albums, one thing I can say for sure is that a good-sounding album is totally fake relative to the actual, natural sounds of the instruments involved. That's fine, because it sounds good. An accurate recording doesn't sound good. It's too loud or too quiet (often in the same passage), lacks a sense of space, and lacks impact.