Objective led subjective is what I subscribe too.
Being militant on either spectrum takes away from truly getting to the end of your search (who am I kidding, this space is just a cycle of purchase hungry addicts)
So for example, I heard the MoFi 888 last year in a less than ideal but better than normal convention space during AXPONA. Loved it so much I placed an order before ever seeing any reviews or any data set (CEA-2034 to be exact) and I am very measurements leaning but i trusted my ears and Andrew Jones.
Note: I heard many speakers that people extol here, and they were anything but balanced. Some were outright terrible, and I question people’s hearing but hey, that is what they hear.
But when I got them in my space, I used Room EQ Wizard, a measurement mic to determine how they were exciting my room modes and then planned sound acoustic solutions as a result of that. then Erin’s review even made everything I was hearing that much clearer (that was my first time actually listening to a speaker reviewer be right about things from start to finish)
So yes whilst I iterated with data, I listened to note what I like about the changes I was making. That actually saved me a lot of headache andled to me achieving my goal of a competent speaker system in my space.
On the other hand if I had just gone blindly into only listening, out hearing whilst sensitive and good is susceptible to many biases and having a guiding light can lead to you spending less and actually making the right decisions.
Long story short, subjective for how we feel about a system but through an objective lens to weed out useless fixes, unneeded fixes, wrong fixes and wrong systems @bdp24