@hilde45 - if I may, your analogy of food is not quite correct, because regardless of what you prefer there, you’re still eating the real thing - you’d need a simulacrum of the experience of taste and smell to make a more relevant analogy with sound reproduction in hifi audio. I could well say I prefer soft furry things to sharp edges in relation to what my fingers touch, but I cannot deny the realism of either, regardless of preference.
Regardless of whether it’s sight, sound, taste, smell or touch, the only basis any of us have of gauging the quality of what has been reproduced has to be founded on the criteria of how close that reproduction is to our closest understanding of the original, and not some random criteria of preference, of all things.
And to say we all hear differently, is another unsupported argument audiophiles persistently make - sure we all hear differently, but the basis, the source of reality of what we each hear is the same, and it evens out as a collective understanding - meaning, your sense of what constitutes reality cannot be different from mine, simply because the perceived source is the same. We may receive it differently, but we can each point to the source itself as its definition. While we may each taste real beef differently, we all recognise the taste of real beef as real beef, regardless of how it’s prepared. And that simulacrum of your preferred beef would have to be itself gauged together with the particular reality source (sauce haha) it was prepared with. You may not like your beef rare, or with mustard, but your only gauge of how good, or ‘accurate’ that simulacrum of rare beef with or without mustard, could only possibly come from your having actually tasted the real thing.
Accuracy in music reproduction does exist, even if it’s more convenient to say our preferences matter more.
In friendship - kevin