The most difficult thing to discern is who listens to equipment, and who listens to music?
Ages ago when there were stereo stores all over the place, I fell in love with new speakers everyday. It's for certain I was an equipment lover then, but that's before I got into "The high end". My favorite tuner was "Sansui", it had a most beguiling sound that was quite soothing, and many people still prefer them to more accurate tuners.
My favorite speaker was first JBL, and next it was the Amazing Carver Speakers;
https://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/290carver/index.htmlThe music had an other worldly quality; "ephemeral", I guess would be the one word description, but at one time I liked "reverb" in my car, that made your automobile sound like you were in a cave.
When I got into the high end, I finally discovered how good the music sounded unadorned without any tricks. Since most speakers have some kind of "sound", I had mine custom built to have no sound of their own, but to deliver the music, the same as a Class A amplifier delivers it to them; without anything added or subtracted from the music, only what the artist wanted you to hear, his music, with each and every individual nuance.
While I mentioned Class A because it is "Theoretically perfect", I can not audibly distinguish it from AB.
One of the problems of differentiating music lovers from equipment lovers, is that equipment lovers will almost never come clean and admit it (maybe they don't know themselves) consequently, right or wrong, I discern who is an equipment lover, and who is a music lover. This is very important when reading Posts.