If you were serious about sound you would...

If absolute accuracy was the goal, then this would be a simple engineering exercise. Users would go to Consumers Reports for the "best buy" based on SINAD and price. No reviewers, forums or print.   A lot of people may find that to be their preference. They want to skip the audiophile game and just listen to music. 

I want to find what cues fool my biased lying brain to make me believe it is musical so I listen to the music, not the playback system. 

If you want perfect, then a Benchmark stack ( for the rich) or a Topping stack (for mere mortals) would do for the electronics. All speakers are terrible so that is tougher.  There would be no tube equipment left. No R2R DACs. No snake oil. 

So others subjective views along with objective measures can narrow our search. Not for sound perfection, but for hearing perfection. Sound is real. Hearing is our opinion and our opinions differ.  Audiophile is finding what sounds right to you. Mostly with the goal to listen to the music.  Audiofool is belief things that are not real but expensive leads to perfection because they can pay for it. Often for bragging rights.  Funny. I was in a store and noticed a Macintosh turn table. I have never known them for tables.  Salesman admitted, they only sell them to people who want to claim they have one and never use it.  Audiofools.  It may be a great table and some may use them.  Don't have a clue as I gave up vinyl as I prefer to play music rather than play with music. 

Modern processed recordings may be more "perfect" but they lose some musicality. Pitch-box, 2 bar splice together, compressed, and processed may be technically better, but I prefer the human musicality of the entire performance. It makes a difference when the band is actually playing together taking cues from each other. Even a lot of "live performances" are spliced together and processed. . I liked the old direct to disk where they did the full side, the whole band, mixer to lathe. Flawed but musical.  Harry James could really "swing"  I don't miss the WOW and flutter, tape his, crosstalk and next groove bleed of vinyl.  Perfection or music. Take your pick. Your choice.

i dont trust anyone who speak about good sound and cannot improve  a lot any speakers room performance...

I dont trust people who propose branded name instead of acoustical, electrical and mechanical solutions...

purchasing an upgrade is useless if we dont understand how to improve to his optimum what we already own...

@facten Good question why would I say If you were serious about sound you would.... When I enjoy my music tube amps and big speaker system much more. That is because of the fact that audiophiles are living is a world of contradictions. Have you ever seen a magazine article or YouTube review about a pice of 200k audio equipment that sounds wow but has nothing to do with the accuracy of the music and they say as much. They say their equipment will bring you to the the live sound experience, well concerts usually sound awful and modern recordings have lots of post processing on them even acoustic recordings, pop, jazz, country, etc.... recordings aren't made at the same time and use close miking techniques that are not the same as live recordings and you don't listen to the clarinet section 2 feet away from their instruments in a concert. I did a movie in Prague and they love classical music there, they often had wonderful musicians play in museums or churches and you would sit wherever you wanted, one of the performances has a trio playing in the middle of the stairs and it sounded wonderful. If I had done a recording it would've only been valid for where I was sitting it wouldn't have been an accurate representation of how those performers sounded as when you record a real album. 

If you as an audiophile say accuracy be damned I'm going to create an experience, perhaps 6x subs and 12x speakers all around your listen position without a system to give you some standardization like Dolby Atmos for instance you may have an incredible listening experience for a few songs or movies but when someone who comes in and knows how that song is supposed to sound or how the movies space ships are suppose to move around the room you may not have it right at all. That is a hollow and quickly fading experience. If we are to keep music alive and away from MP3 and cheep earbuds we need as audiophiles to start to agree on some baseline definitions of what playback systems should be.

Right now the marketing departments of overly expensive equipment are using rich audiophiles as useful idiots and no one is making a fuss.

Acoustics unlike digital audio is not defined by bits ACCURACY alone ....

Acoustic accuracy include many parameters which cannot be reducible to a playback system specs ... We need a room to measure these parameters and more than that we nead two ears with a head and the parameters which are associated with them...

Then the gear choices, when they are relatively well chosen to begin with , matter less than their acoustics embeddings ...

Then yes we need to pick a good playback system and it is not the one you will recommend for everyone and for all needs..

What we need is defining the basic acoustical, mechanical and electrical embeddings controls for ANY playback system..

For example, because of the acoustic revolution created by Dr, Choueiri, his BACCH filters must be included in any TOP acoustic embeddings list of controls...

They will work with ANY basic good playback system choices...

Any other embeddings controls will do the same...

It is useless to choose a playback system with no knowledge about his optimal embeddings controls...

we need as audiophiles to start to agree on some baseline definitions of what playback systems should be.

@mahgister It won't be long, my guess in 1.5 years that AI will completely changes the home audio world. Some smart company will use a group like the AES/EBU and record companies to agree on a baseline standard for acoustics. I believe that surround sound will be the norm and there will be an objective baseline in small room acoustics. AI will change everything because the most important aspect of good playback is acoustics, I'm bias because I started in acoustics but if you look at experiments with acoustic devices (passive not DSP) they can make even cheep speakers sound amazing. When this happens great systems will still be great and produce the emotions that we connect with in music and movies but there will be a standard and people will understand that expensive huge playback systems are a train without tracks.