Conspicuously absent is the first thing I listen for, and has been since I was 18 years old: How closely reproduced vocals approach the sound of real life ones. I recorded my 3-year-old’s voice with a small capsule condenser mic plugged into a Revox A77, and use that recording to evaluate the sound of loudspeakers, a brutal test.
I also recorded the sound of my Gretsch drumset (early-70’s "stop sign" badge) and Paiste 602 cymbals---the sounds of which I am of course intimately familiar---with a pair of the same mic. I can actually strike the drums and cymbals as the recording plays on speakers, and get an instant comparison between the sound of the drums and cymbals and how any given loudspeaker reproduces the recording of them. Another brutally revealing test.
I first saw the terms "accurate timbre" and "vowel coloration" in the early-1970’s writings of J. Gordon Holt in his Stereophile Magazine (he was it’s owner and sole reviewer), and instantly adopted those parameters (the presence of the former, the absence of the latter) as the most important in the reproduction of music. FAR more important than, say, soundstaging.
I was also drawn to the writings of Art Dudley, from whom I added "color saturation" and "tonal density" to my hi-fi vocabulary/lexicon. Art referred to imaging (in all it’s diverse forms) as "parlour tricks".😊 Harry Pearson placed soundstaging at just about the top of his priority list.