The following information comes from an interview between A Link Between Worlds composer Ryo Nagamatsu, and the Official Nintendo Maagzine.
When Nagamatsu was asked about the use of an orchestra in the game he replied,
By “orchestra”, I assume you mean live orchestra. We never intended to use a live orchestra for the development of this game. There are various reasons to this from a development perspective.
The most prominent reason is that we wanted to create optimal sound for Nintendo 3DS. Live orchestras are definitely impressive, but they produce too much reverberation and include too many low-pitch sounds to be suitable for the Nintendo 3DS speakers.
This time, our goal was to create sounds that satisfied both players who use headphones and those who don’t. We wanted, therefore, orchestra-quality sounds that had the appropriate reverberation and instrumental arrangement for the Nintendo 3DS speakers. We concluded that the best approach would be to use the high quality sound resources that are now available to us.
Source: ONM
