"Ultimately we don't know how a recording is supposed to sound like."
Such an unprepossessing sentence and yet one that threatens to undermine the entire audiophile industry.
It is the reality unfortunately. Take video production. It has strict standard for luma and chroma (black and white and color information). Content is created using that standard. So as long as you calibrate your display to the same, you get the identical colors as was seen by people who reproduced the content. This has enabled displays to become incredibly accurate in the last few years.
In sharp contrast, no one knows the tonality of anything produced in creation of music. That brightness in music may be part of it, your may bey our speaker. You don't know. Dr. Toole calls it circle of confusion. I call it "broken architecture." Here is a survey Genelec did of their customers in high end production suites (for film sound):
See the incredible variations? And this is with Genelec speakers where each unit is measured and fully calibrated to neutral when manufactured.
There is some hope here. As long as we all rally around neutral speakers, then we can reduce the level of confusion and lack of consistency. This is slowly happening as even low cost speakers are striving for this now. Sadly, many high-end speakers go their own way with at times abominable tonality.