Listening is a skill. It requires lots of practice and study to learn the vocabulary of standard descriptive terms. For experienced amateurs and professionals assessing sound qualities are relatively easy and comparable across listeners. Kind of like reading X-rays. For the professional… he’ll just rattle off what this is and what that is while to the untrained eye, all you see is fuzzy gray areas.
So all this discussion about how subjective sound is, or it is some trick of the mind comes from inexperience. I can take three different experiencesed audiophiles and get exactly the same description of sound qualities of a system or changes in that system exactly and consistently. Most of the subjectivity involves words like good or better… value statements about your values… what you like and don’t like.