It depends on the purpose of a sound system. What is it being asked to do? If the goal is high fidelity, then what you personally like has absolutely nothing to do with what is best. What is best is what sounds closest to a live performance. But that leads to an endless series of questions and problems. Problem, there is no STANDARD way to make a recording. Five recording engineers would make five different sounding recordings of the same performance. Which one is right? All of them.... and none of them. In carefully contrived live versus recorded demonstrations, Acoustic Research Inc. which is now 50 years old demonstrated the accuracy of their speakers in the 1960s and 1970s. When you heard tapes made out of doors with no double echoes played alternating with the performing live musicians who made them, the similarity was striking. Yet many people didn't like the sound of those speakers. And yes they had very flat on axis frequency response and strived for very flat response of total radiated power. We are talking here about the reproduction of documentary recordings of acoustic instruments because the reproduction of electronic insturments and reproduction of manufactured or processed music has no objective real or even hypothetical live standard to be compared to. What do I mean by documentary recordings? Simply recordings which have the goal to recreate the original live performance as closely as possible. This does not necessarily mean that the signal wasn't manipulated but if it was, the purpose was to achieve the same end goal recognizing the limitations of the recording process and attempting to overcome it.

The best speakers make musical instruments sound the way we remember hearing them live to the greatest degree and most frequently possible. Unfortunately, after all our technology, the really good ones are few and far between.