frogman,
Ah, now I understand you better. Your references are bass clarinet, saxes which are middle and lower midrange/midbass instruments, as opposed to the violin, which is midrange/HF. Lower freq instruments gel at greater distance, and are more focused at greater distance. But the violin has severe HF loss with distance, due to the physics of the air medium's preferential absorption of HF. As a result, the limited SPL of the violin is severely lost at HF. Still, the sax has HF transients which can be lost at greater distance. I once played on a shallow stage, seated in an inner violin seat close to the French horn. For the first time, I heard the midrange/HF tactile edges of the horn, part of its natural tone, whereas when heard from greater distance it has only a smooth, amorphous legato type sound. James Boyk wrote an article about "life after 20 kHz" to show that even the old smoothie F horn has significant output at 9 kHz.
I appreciate that the bass clarinet and cello are separated more at close distances than from further away. Now we get into the issues of different seating arrangements on stage. The standard American seating is 1st and 2nd violins together on the left, cellos in front right. I admit that onstage, playing 1st violin, I love this position where I can hear the 2nd violins playing the lower octave close to me. But in the audience, this rear 2nd violin position severely rolls off the HF and brilliance of that section. The composer wrote the 2nd violin part to be less brilliant than the 1st violin part, so it is a shame to further handicap the 2nds. An exception is the Rossini string sonatas where the 1st and 2nd violin parts are almost identical, and he wanted a ping pong effect from the European seating (see below). You probably enjoy the recessed usual 2nd violin positioning, so when the 1sts and 2nds alternate, you get an echo effect, a spatiality game from the upfront 1sts and recessed 2nds. I just hate the obvious muddied sound of the poor 2nds compared to the 1sts.
The European style is to have the 2nd violins in the front row on the right. Toscanini described the 1st violins as his left shoulder and the 2nds as his right shoulder. As a player on the stage, I dislike this arrangement the way you dislike the separation of the bass clarinet and cello. But in the audience, it is nice to have the separation that Toscanini liked. Still, the 2nds are handicapped because their soundboard projects to the rear of the stage, and the 1sts project front to the audience.
My most enjoyable recordings have been with small chamber groups spread out like a crescent. Relatively close miking lets everyone shine. Even if there is more separation which has the risk of poor blending, good musicians play together to get good blending even in this situation. But if the stage is wide and deep, the separation impedes the ensemble. An example was when I heard the Prelude to Act 1 of Lohengrin. The front string section was brilliant and clear, but the two cymbal crashes at the climax were a DISASTER sonically. The cymbals were at the rear of the deep stage. The reverberation from the deep stage caused smearing of the HF brilliance of the cymbals. The cymbal is the most brilliant instrument, with lots of energy up to 200 kHz, but this sounded worse than a terrible home speaker with the tweeters blown.