How can you evaluate a system with highly processed music?

@cd318 & @onhwy61 

Thanks.  That is helpful.  I am not a musician nor do I create or music - I am a consumer - and I often wonder - what is that instrument or is it a computer/synth or even does their voice really sound like that ?!.   Your comments are helpful.  

Test tones? Seriously? That is ridiculous. Music is simultaneous sounds at vastly different frequencies fading in and out at grossly different rates. The system has to be able to reproduce them all without interfering with each other. Nearly infinitely more difficult than test tones.

“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?”

This👆 by @hilde45

+100!!

The only “evaluation” is whether it sounds good to you or not.  
If it sounds good, the evaluation is: “A”.  
If it doesn’t, then hopefully you can make some sound, sensible choices to improve what’s lacking (you’re in a good spot here on this forum for guidance in this matter) without going crazy on the bank account and sanity quotient.

The way the word “processed” is being bandied about strikes me as problematic.  
There’s no such thing as sound that is not “processed.” 
Person A, with their particular physical condition, particular mind, and particular personal proclivities, listening to a live acoustic instrument, 10 feet away from the player, is “processing” that aural stimulus differently than Person B, even if at the exact same distance.  
Human beings.  
It just gets far more “processed” after that. 
Entirely acoustic instruments recorded by microphones that “process” the sound waves into an electrical signal. Signals then “processed” into a recording. 
Throw in mixing and mastering…. 

Going upwards from here, there are so many different instruments that are electric, there are so many ways to manipulate the signal (intentionally or unintentionally) before it even reaches the recording, there are so many synthesized sounds at the actual instrument stage…

If people have a problem with instruments that aren’t completely acoustic, that’s their prerogative and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. To each their own.

Should such a person make the unwise decision to eschew being a normal, healthy person who passionately loves music and just wants to spend their life enjoying it, to instead become an obsessive, anxiety-addled neurotic who spends more time fretting over minutiae than the former (aka an ‘audiophile’ - I’m being sarcastic, yes, but lovingly so…been there, done that), then that person would just make that acoustic-only music they prefer sound as good as possible.  
Who cares what other people say?  
If someone else makes Skrillex sound “perfect” (to them, of course) in their system, that person has “evaluated” their system, and given it a grade of “A.”

Pace John Atkinson and his bass, but it depends on how much processing.  If he just amplifies the sound direct from the instrument using a vanilla amplifier then yes, a direct comparison between systems can have validity.  But if the signal is processed to the point of being artificialised then there is no basis for comparison.  All you can say is rendition on which system excites you the most.