@snilf Thanks for your post. Really well put, and the coffee anecdote is great.
I think you're exactly right that the "objective" standard unravels quickly. The notion of reproducing the "original performance" falls apart the moment you look at how recordings actually get made. The same album remastered in different decades can sound dramatically different. The studio where the mix was finalized almost certainly used monitors nothing like what any of us play back on at home. The recording engineer made dozens of aesthetic choices — mic placement, EQ, compression, reverb — that already represent an *interpretation* of the original event. So which version is the "objective" reference? There isn't one. It's interpretations all the way down.
What I find interesting is the quiet rhetorical move where "objective" slides into "real" and then into "better." Measurements become a proxy for accuracy, accuracy becomes a proxy for fidelity to something real, and fidelity to the real becomes the standard of quality. But each of those steps is a philosophical leap, not a given. And I think that chain of identifications is often a way of dodging harder questions — namely, what makes for genuinely good *interpretive* criticism of sound reproduction? The kind that's nuanced, cumulative, built on experience and careful listening, and open to revision. That's the hard work, and slapping "objective" on a frequency response graph lets you skip it.
As you probably know, your coffee story is actually a beautiful illustration of something Hume argued about taste. He insisted that taste isn't just brute preference — it's a capacity that can be educated, refined, and improved through experience and exposure to good examples. You didn't just switch to filtered water and decide to prefer it arbitrarily. You trusted a knowledgeable friend, gave it time, and your palate genuinely developed: the cultivation of discernment. Hume would say your current preference is *better* than your old one, not because filtered water is "objectively" superior in some measurable sense, but because your taste is now more informed, more experienced, and more capable of drawing relevant distinctions. That's the kind of standard worth aspiring to — not objectivity, but educated judgment.