I'm at best an amateur. But I would often test this on my mother: "Hey ma, play me the slow movement from Beethoven's sonata-whatever." She would. I'd then ask her to transpose it: to Ab, to C#, to the most remote key I could think of. She would, and ALWAYS would say "See? It's all wrong!" even though I could hear no difference other than pitch. Now she was playing a modern piano, tempered so that the only difference between the relation among notes was pitch. But to her ear, each key had a specific 'personality' and that was that! The only explanation I have come up with is that she associated certain keys (I'm assuming she had perfect pitch or close to it) with other orchestral or chamber pieces in that key involving instruments where key selection is important (getting on the fringes of my competence here, but you wouldn't ask a folk guitarist, say, to fire up a song in F#); she thus 'heard' each key within the context of the entire classical and jazz repertoire in that key.
Notes, keys, and questions.
I am not a trained musician. I cannot tell an A-Minor from a doe is a female deer. I hear loudness, instruments, harmonies....musical generalities translated into vague verbal terms. No issue with it other than a curiosity into how others, especially trained musicians who read notes like I read books, "hear" music. For instance. "My system handles B-Major much better than D-Minor." Does a trained musician translate what they hear into defined notes and keys? Whereas the majority translate it into words shaped by experience and/or general industry assumptions. Or is that even a reasonable assertion?