Have a question(s) for you Audiophiles out there:

In reviews of hi-fi equipment, professional or personal, one often reads things like: "...it reproduced the sound accurately..." or "...there was a measure of smoothness..." blah, blah, blah.

The question is, unless the Producer, or the Artist of that music was there to give the “nod”, how can one claim that this AV gear is better than that one, or worse yet “mine is better than yours”? Maybe criticisms like "lack of bass response" or "narrow upper-midrange" is what the Artist really intended.

Recently, I was having a discussion with someone regarding Cassette tape vs. Minidisc in another site. During the discussion, he claimed that his tape machine would “outperform” any Minidisc player or CD player for that matter. Although I've never had the chance of listening to this particular model, I was skeptical to say the least. I've heard and owned a handful of cassette decks in my day, but I have never thought its sound better than that of CDs or minidisc. Even with Dolby S, cassette hiss always bothered me, and it never sounded full. Sure, minidisc is compressed, but still…
At one point, this person was so adamant that the only conclusion I could think of was that their ears simply preferred the cassette sound, but claiming “outperform” was difficult to accept.

Also, I’ve always liked the sound of vinyl. There is something to it and it sounds very different from the digital mediums, but is the “vinyl sound” how its suppose to be? Shouldn’t the comparisons be based on how well the equipment reproduces the original sound?

With that in mind, it seems that the only real comparison is with numbers or specifications. Even then, all equipment would need to be measured with the exact same test equipment to make it objective. So, all AV gear comparisons should only have Tables filled with data (e.g. Freq Resp., S/N ratio, etc.) and should leave listening tests out of the picture. In other words, show me the data!!

No offense here. Just want to read your thoughts on this.