To be fair, they may often sound a lot like what they actually sound like at the place where the microphones are, it's just most folks never hear them from there. And also they may sound like they sound when heard from multiple such places at once, which we never actually do either. In such cases that doesn't mean it's not a real representation of the sound, just a real representation that we can't normally experience.
Though obviously drums are often fairly to very significantly EQ'd because they are such massive frequency suckers. I imagine it's more likely today that they would be heavily EQ'd (meaning not a special effect in this case) than would have been in Ken's prime.