the meaning of the word "better"

Nice having you back John!

To me better applies to how real or realistic the music sounds. Go to a concert in a small venue and listen. Go to an outdoor concert with drums and band and listen. Then listen to similar sound in your home. Is is even close? Do you get the dynamics of a snare drum that you heard outside? how real is the sound coming out of your system? When doing an A/B listening comparison, that is my focus.

enjoy

I appreciate Mrtennis's question, and especially Elizabeth's response. Every hobby has its own vocabulary, words that help us explain what we're doing and experiencing. Last year I stumbled across some reviews by Jeff Day (6moons.com) and appreciated how he distinguished between two sets of attributes: soundstaging, transparency, imaging, and detail recovery on the one hand, and things like beat, rhythm, and melody on the other. He mentioned that components and systems that excel at the former often lose the latter. Elizabeth pointed out that none of us are neutral, that we all favor some aspects of performance over others. If we use specific audio terminology to explain why one component or group of components serves our needs better than another, the ambiguity Mrtennis laments will be resolved, and the reader will understand why person A can think a Rega RP6 is clearly better than a SOTA Comet (about the same price once you add a dustcover and hinge kit to the Comet) while person B thinks the opposite.