Respectfully to all who have posted on this, I am with
@Blackmorec and
@treitz3 here that yes, it is possible in a smaller room (mine is currently 14'x17', with openings on 2 sides, down from much larger rooms in past houses) with a 2-channel system of sufficient synergy and quality (note that doesn't necessarily mean highest price) to render an immersive and compelling recreation of a large symphony orchestra at the hall, soloist, sectional and overall ensemble level, and for that matter, pipe organ recordings (the most complex instrument on the planet to render properly IMHO) too in the beautiful spaces they inhabit to which the the organ itself is actually designed into the space so it too becomes part of the total playback experience. As an aside, anyone who's ever heard the Newberry Organ at Yale in Woolsey Hall (the hall designed and maintained specifically down to fabric in the seats as part of the overall instrument's sonic rendering) or the Cavaille-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris and so many other fine examples to know what I'm talking about.
Of all the music I love from a very large collection across a wide selection of genres, a few thousand large scale symphonic and pipe organ recordings have been the recordings whose playback I've used in terms of the ultimate test of rendering quality of my system above all others with regards to judging realism of the musical playback experience and recreation of the venue. Jazz of all types is of course near and dear to my preferences as well and a close second in the analysis.
The premise that you cannot do it in a 'smaller' room is IMHO flawed as it blurs many details. For example, if your speakers and system don't recreate a multi-dimensional venue in a smaller room by giving you wide and deep soundstaging and in-room wrap-around (the listener) sound stage and accurately creating the sonic queues of the space in a small to medium sized room in all four (4) dimensions (X, Y, Z and time) chances are (again IMHO) that won't happen just because you have a slightly bigger or much bigger room with that system and those speakers. Sure you'll get 'more' but a larger room is not the panacea in and of itself that it's made out to be with all due respect to posters who have asserted that.
The premise also that you might be able to do it, but only with multi-channel, is also blurring many details. I read that type of high-level 'expert advice' many years ago and took it to heart, unfortunately not being experienced enough at the time to see the flaws in the statement. With respect to the latter, multi-channel alone does NOT necessarily get you there in and off itself; after a couple hundred thousand dollars in chasing that particular dragon I can attest to that; most multi-channel recordings of symphonic and pipe organ do not have comprehensive attention paid (again IMHO) to the surround and back-surround channels; they DO contain some level of info in the mids and higher frequencies but they are not 'full frequency spectrum' surround recordings. Further, even if my point of view on these recordings is incorrect, unless you chase your multi-channel experience with the same level of attention to detail w.r.t. amplification, cabling, use of full range speakers that render the full bass octaves recreation (or speakers with stereo subs on all surround channel pairs) you really aren't going to get the full recreation of the event that way either assuming multi-channel is the only way to get there and the recordings give you full surround information in the mix.
I don't believe much of this hobby cum obsession can be summed up by all those 'one-liner truths' that we are so often confronted with as
It's much more involved than that. Chasing those one-liner 'truths' can also be very costly...