Thanks for an elaborate answer! Being both a technician and a musician, I couldn't agree more. The technician in me strives to have as flat, transparent and p

Thanks for an elaborate answer! Being both a technician and a musician, I couldn't agree more. The technician in me strives to have as flat, transparent and precise audio reproduction system as possible, with the single purpose: to make what the musician in me does translatable to every other audio system out there, which may very well be quite imperfect, but still intimately known and adapted to by its listener - and thus reproduce my music without surprising the listener in a bad way. (Funny enough, after many years of chasing that ideal, I'm much closer to it with balanced armature IEMs than with a pair of professional studio monitors at 100x the price!) An analogy in graphics would be a display with neutral color reproduction that has as perfect black as possible and white as bright as it's sane to have. It's a never ending quest of course, and it's the creator's one, not spectator's. Which is basically "give me pure silence and transparency so that I know precisely how much sound and color to add". How much is added is a dogma for one and total freedom for another, and that's a completely different story. From a spectator's point of view, everything becomes much more subjective and roots more in psychology than anything else. I always remember that interview of a vinyl mastering engineer for the Kompakt label, who said that the art of an audioengineer is that of persuasion. "This sounds awesome, trust me :) And then, the reconstructive abilities of one's perception also mean a lot. There's a wonderful passage from the Hesse's Steppenwolf, where the protagonist listens to a gramophone record, noisy and bandlimited, of an orchestra playing a piece, deeper and deeper until he manages to hear the original sound and intent of it through the veil of the record's imperfections.