Great debate between atmasphere and hilde45...
Very interesting ...
I will add nothing just a line :
Psycho-acoustics field studies even "taste" in experiments dividing people in group according to their history, measured hearing , musical habits etc ...
In Psycho-acoustic the objective part of reality and the subjective part are summonned together in very specific conditions ...This is why a good designer as atmasphere can design his amplifiers according to psycho-acoustic observations and facts ...It is why dr. Choueiri design his filters to recreate the spatial qualities of sound ...
There is a point about hilde45 observation that is very important though , hearing theories are in competition and we dont know how our brain hearing works completely ...Even after all measures done in all related fields including neurophysiology and physical acoustics and all there is between them ...
We dont know how the brain/ears beat the Fourier limit for example working non linearly in his own time domain : «For the first time, physicists have found that humans can discriminate a sound’s frequency (related to a note’s pitch) and timing (whether a note comes before or after another note) more than 10 times better than the limit imposed by the Fourier uncertainty principle»
So good is our technology , some deep mysteries subsist about hearing and sound ...
But once this is said, in applied day to day audio experience , "tastes" play a role mostly in marketing , the greatest role for taste is here ... Not in design nor in acoustics ..Not in the end result after creating the right balanced conditions for an audiophile perception ... everyone recognize a good sound when they encounter it ... If it was not the case , small room acoustics and great Hall acoustic architecture will not exist as acoustic knowledge among other knowledge , and these two acoustic dispositions so different they could be and they are , derived from the same laws and work the same for all brain ... There is a general acoustic consensus about it ...
I apologize because my "line" is a few paragraphs ... 😊