What a difficult pastime this is to get any sense out of?
First of all no two people interpret the movement of air in the same fashion. What sounds like cacophonous noise to some can be interpreted as sweet music to others.
Then there's the problem of hearing loss and missing - or merely reduced in volume - frequencies (ie damaged hearing). I seem to be able hear 16kHz better than 14kHz and then very little above.
As if that wasn't bad enough then there's the question of mood and levels of fatigue, health etc. Not much sounds good with toothache etc and neither will love songs if you're going through breakup.
To finally cap it off regarding the human condition, we all change. A friend of mine has a great system topped off with a classic pair of KEF floorstanding speakers yet listens to it with the bass reduced and the treble turned up. It would be funny except I can remember being the same when I was in my teens! Just couldn't get enough sweet treble in those days. The rest of the frequency hardly mattered then, I wanted music with energy and speed, I had enough of my own to burn in those days.
Then we come to the differences in listening rooms. Shape, floor, walls, location, seating position etc We haven't even got to the music or equipment yet!
Audio equipment can attempt to follow the rules of conforming to a flat frequency response, but often it doesn't as the trend of boosting the bass in headphones proved. The trick of boosting the treble can also be attention grabbing in the short term, or a pain in the backside in the long.
Finally we come to the recordings themselves. We could ask whether anyone ever tries to record accurate sound in the studio. Ever since the 1950's the trickery in manipulating sound has developed in leaps and bounds to such an extent that recording anything 'straight' is usually limited to documentaries or simple location recordings, sometimes in a church!
Basically, most recordings, all if we're talking Pop, are works of fiction which stretch if not actually break our credulity.
They exist to cater to our fantasies. OK maybe someone else's fantasies. Perhaps the producer's, the artist's but usually the record company's idea of what the paying public wants.
So is any attempt to make sense of audio doomed to be just a question of interpretation, a mere art form at best? Can we ever reach anything more than a loose vague consensus given the difficulty of communicating our sensations and thoughts with any degree of precision?
I doubt it. I think it is all a question of interpretation whilst seeking a something we can be happy with. The only people who seem to care for consistency seem to be the broadcasting professionals as the famous example of the BBC funding expensive painstaking research into loudspeakers proved (one result was the legendary LS3/5).
For us audiophiles it can only be a good thing to listen to music through as many different systems as we can, even if our opinions can only be of limited relevance to anyone else.
At least until telepathic machines are sufficiently developed!
