@mglik
Each to their own.
But can you really evaluate a system by listening to highly processed, electric/electronic music? How do you know what that sounds like?
I like to listen to voices and acoustic music that is little processed.
Instruments like piano, violin, etc.
And the human voice. And the joy of hearing back up singers clearly, etc.
Even if full instrumentation backing a natural sounding voice.
(eg.: singer/songwriters like Lyle Lovett or Leonard Cohen)
There is a standard and a point of reference that can be gauged.
OMG!
I've been saying this for years. And have posted it on various audio forums.
At least in order to get a reasonable baseline of how accurate the system is, or in order to tell if a change made an improvement or not.
Most people have heard acoustic instruments, and have a good idea of what they sound like. And if they hear those instruments, with minimal processing, on a system, they can tell how close it sounds to hearing it live.
But with musicians playing electronic instruments in the studio, even if we know the guitarist was playing a Strat, we can't possibly know what effects they were playing through, or how the engineer manipulated the signal after it was recorded. Things get even worse with synths.
Then there is the entire aspect of soundstage and imaging. The vast majority of studio recordings, if they have any semblance of soundstage and imaging, it is almost completely artificial, created by the engineer using: panning, delay, phase, and other studio tricks. Not to mention, the musicians are usually not playing at the same time, in the same acoustic space, so there is no natural relationship of musicians to the space, or the other musicians.
Where, with classical recordings, for example, all the musicians are playing at the same time, in the same acoustic space, where recording engineers take great effort to capture the event as it happens, with as much of the ambience and other spatial cues of the acoustic space (usually using something like a Decca tree or Blunlein mic setup) .
Therefore, if a violinist sounds like they are coming from the left of the other musicians, or the percussionist sounds like they are coming from back of the ensemble, it is because that is where they were when the recording was made. Not because the engineer panned them to sound as if that is where they were.