I have spent a lot of time thinking about some of these aspects. One of the reasons I reduced my attendance of rock and most electric jazz concerts about twenty years ago… I have been exposed to them and typically go running out during the first tune with my hands clasped over my ears (slight exaggeration). I can’t take the background high frequency distortion, frequently the tonal balance and often the sheer volume when a sound engineer sitting all the way in the back decides cranking it up makes it sound better. I no longer subject my precious hearing to them. I listen to my system at home. No crowds either.
Creating music and reproducing music are completely different things. Driving tubes to distort for a concert is a creative and not a precise process. Reproducing that one guitar sound plus all the other ones simultaneously and accurately is a Herculean task. Since each electronic concert or studio recording is unreproducible the audiophile cannot have access to the original or something that very close to it as a standard. But acoustic symphony orchestras and acoustic jazz can be a standard. Symphonic has near zero volume to the maximum your hearing is capable of interpreting, dozens of different instruments in solo and some/ all en mass. Acoustic jazz also affords a subset of these things. So, this affords us a ruler to tune our system correctly to recreate music. If we optimize these we can be relatively sure we have done as good a job of optimizing the other forms of music as well.
Creating music and reproducing music are completely different things. Driving tubes to distort for a concert is a creative and not a precise process. Reproducing that one guitar sound plus all the other ones simultaneously and accurately is a Herculean task. Since each electronic concert or studio recording is unreproducible the audiophile cannot have access to the original or something that very close to it as a standard. But acoustic symphony orchestras and acoustic jazz can be a standard. Symphonic has near zero volume to the maximum your hearing is capable of interpreting, dozens of different instruments in solo and some/ all en mass. Acoustic jazz also affords a subset of these things. So, this affords us a ruler to tune our system correctly to recreate music. If we optimize these we can be relatively sure we have done as good a job of optimizing the other forms of music as well.