When I was a college student in the early 80's we created a tape of many different instruments playing the exact same note. We used woodwinds, brass, strings, tubular bells, you name it, we had access to the entire orchestra's instrument room.
We then deliberately removed the attack and decay of each note played, leaving only the sustained note.
We then played the tape of notes to a group of listeners and asked them to identify the instrument playing the notes. And no-one could do it.
We then wrote the instruments on the chalk board and told them these were the instruments they could match up to the notes and played the tape again and only a few were identified.
What this experiment tells us is that the way we perceive an instrument's sound has as much to do with the attack and decay as the note being played. Thus when you only focus on the lower end of the frequency spectrum of an instrument you are in a similar way eliminating much of what you need to perceive what you are hearing; after all the attach and decay is mostly in the extreme frequencies.
Taken into consideration you might find it interesting to listen to the whole instruments frequencies, and then replace the lower end with different technologies renderings to get a better perception of the whole sound as it changes.
You may find that by nature some technologies render some instruments with lower frequency spectrums more to your liking than others, mostly depending on the instruments overtones and how the attack-decay-sustain sounds overall with the chosen technology.
Cheers
