inna, the Pink Floyd recordings you cite were made long before their London studio was built, and were recorded in other studios.
Where did you get the idea that microphones are the bottleneck in the recording process? Most commercial studios have a whole plethora of mics, different ones preferred for different applications. Each has a response characteristics that makes it more suitable for one instrument than another. Mica are transducers, just like loudspeakers, but in reverse. And just as do loudspeakers, they all sound a little different. Some are known to be highly neutral in timbre, others somewhat colored. Lots of recording engineers like the Shure SM57 as a snare drum mic because of it’s slight presence peak, which makes the drum "pop" more in the mix. No one thinks of that mic as a sound "standard", but there are mics that are.
As onhwy61 mentioned, Doug Sax (Sheffield Labs) tested mics (and other pieces of recording and playback gear) by doing a by-pass test. He would listen to the musician’s in his studio, then move into the control booth to compare the live sound to that coming out of his monitors (custom built horns, by the way). Doug was after maximum transparency and life-like timbre (not all engineers are), evaluating each pieces by how little it changed the sound in ways other than it’s intended purpose.
The reason John Bonham’s drums sound the way they do on Led Zeppelin’s recordings is not because of the mics used to capture their sound, but rather how those mics were employed. Bonham wanted a "big" drum sound, so he played his drums undamped (no muffling used, leading to an open, ringing sound), the opposite of Ringo and Levon Helm (The Band). Then his engineers didn’t use close-micing (putting each mic right up against the drum head), but rather put a number of mics a fair distance away from the drums, with "room" mics placed even further away. That increased the room-to-drum ratio/balance, and required Bonham to create his own balance between the different drums and cymbals---the balance couldn’t be "fixed in the mix". There is much more that can be said on the subject, as it is a large one.
