mlsstl’s comment dovetails with something I wanted to add. I use unamplified acoustic music as my "personal reference," too. I do like rock, even loud rock (e.g., Tool), but mostly listen to so-called "classical," and I play cello and acoustic guitar; my wife plays piano and my daughter violin. We hear live acoustic instruments in my audio listening space every day. We also sing, my daughter professionally.
Still, here’s a lesson of some kind, I think. I’ve got five pairs of high-end speakers, and two systems (one mostly for movies, in the library, and the main rig for music). Every now and then, I set up one—or even two—of the "extra" speaker pairs in my main listening room in such a way that I can fairly easily switch between them and my favored pair. And let me mention that my favored pair (Scientific Fidelity "Teslas" made in the late 1990s) are rare probably because Corey Greenberg in Stereophile killed the company with a very negative review when they first came out. One of the other pair are highly regarded Von Schweikerts, and another pair won all kinds of awards from Stereophile and other respected places, measuring flatter and with less distortion than any speaker at any price ever measured to that point in the anechoic chamber of Canada’s National Research Council (that’s a hint about its identity). However, of all my speaker pairs, it’s that last one I like the least. And remember: my ears are trained to prefer natural acoustic instruments in the very same acoustic space as my audio system utilizes.
So what’s the "lesson" here? Maybe that listening to recorded music is just a different experience from listening to "the real thing" (if that means: live acoustic instruments, voices, etc.). To the extent that this is true, measurements may actually be misleading—as they are for that speaker I just mentioned but didn’t name.
