How can you evaluate a system with highly processed music?

Obviously I weren’t at the studio and I don’t know how the song sounds like. Once I play the song I will know how the song sounds like. I then play that song on many different systems. I then continue the process like that. This is how I evaluate.

Is the purpose musical enjoyment or "evaluation"?

Count me out.

Listen to and enjoy whatever kind of music gives you pleasure. But to form an opinion on the sonic accuracy of reproduction you have to use identifiably reliable sources. It can be any kind of music…polka, flamenco, marching band, bluegrass, Schubert Lieder, or jazz combo…anything.  But it must be recorded simply, as close to live to two track as possible, with unamplified instruments. 

mglik
THANK YOU!

I have mentioned that so many times and that is probably my biggest reason to give negative comments on things like Graphic equalizers. You might be getting what YOU think a song should sound like but that isn’t necessarily what the artist of Engineering staff intended. Thankfully I am not alone on that and many high end designers provide a bypass circuit to eliminate the TONE elements completely. In my mind if I don’t like the way some album is mixed, then it is their fault and I am not going to waste a lot of time or money trying to make them into something that aren’t.

ALSO along similar lines I take offense at people trying to colour there sound in general by the types of equipment. Of course we al have our preferences but are they NATURAL. I was just listening to a new (to me) artist yesterday and though I liked the content of their songbook, it was unusually bright and almost too much so. I did find that while streaming to some of their other albums, they weren’t so bright. This was an eyeopener for me as I have never really noticed what audiophiles were talking about when telling us that what they experienced in a particular situation was ’Bright’ sounding music. I guess that speaks volumes about MY experience.
As Fuzztone mentioned Do you like it or do you spend your time tearing it appart.

But can you really evaluate a system by listening to highly processed, electric/electronic music? How do you know what that sounds like?

Early on, they thought photography would replace painting because it would be more "realistic." But it didn’t do that because people gradually learned that photographs also have perspective and interpretation. The notion that capturing "the moment" as it "really" was became harder to believe.

The notion that audio equipment is meant to "capture" what something sounds like "live" retains the naiveté which is no longer tenable in the photography/painting question. Most systems can deliver some reasonable level of simulacrum, but various systems will do this differently. (And there's no way to know which is the better one from a realism standpoint; you weren't there and even if you were, where were you sitting, etc.?) It’s those differences that matter and those same types of differences will also qualify different recordings of processed music.

Audio systems deliver qualitative experiences. Electronic or processed music sounds different as delivered by different systems. Live music also sounds different from different systems. The salient question is: how does it sound to you?