We don't, we can't, and we shouldn't worry about it.
Do you live in a house? What was the intent of the carpenter?
Have you taken a cab somewhere? What was the intent of the cab driver?
Do you take medicine? What is the intent of the pharmacy?
Do you eat at a restaurant? What is the intent of the chef?
Did you attend school? What was the intent of your teachers?
Agreed, generally speaking.
If I remember correctly, Archimago once said "All we can expect a device to do, is to be faithful to the recording at hand, we can not guess the intentions of the artists or the engineers who produced it".
That is very true! a harsh recording should sound harsh, a soft recording . . . . .
The same goes for bright recording, Warm recording (whatever that means).
The problem there, though, is the one I keep raising: it seems to leave the ultimate aim for this hobby unmoored - just hanging in the air without justification.
Why in the world
should anyone care about "being faithful to the recording" and reproducing it accurately? Stopping there seems to be utterly arbitrary, as if hif-fi is just some academic pursuit of "reproducing a signal for the sake of reproducing a signal."
And this makes a lot of the derision of "colored" components all the more arbitrary. If you can't give a good answer why anyone should, or would want to concentrate on reproducing the signal faithfully, you'd have no right to castigate any deviation from this goal. And yet we see just such derision for colored components here all the time.
The original version of "high fidelity" at least had a sort of north star goal of "reproducing the sensation of hearing real live performances. " As far away a goal as that may be, it was at least some yardstick/goal that seemed non-arbitrary. (After all, why were they recording music performances in the first place, if not to hear that specific sound at the other end - playback?)
I think that if you take the view "I want to reproduce the recorded signal as accurately as possible" you inevitably bring in some sort of "artist intent" in terms of "hearing the artistic choices of the artist, as unmolested as possible."
And then of course there's quicksand there...the circle of confusion.
My own approach navigating all these concerns is this:
Like Jim Taylor said: I don't
worry much about the artist's intent.
Notice I didn't say I don't
care about the artists intent. There certainly is a sense in which I care very much about the artists intend. After all they made all sorts of artistic decisions in making the music, and those decisions are what make their music "theirs."
But
I don't worry much about not getting the intent because:
1. I can't know precisely the artists intent - circle of confusion among other things. But I would say I can infer a more general intent for most musicians: that the listener enjoys their music! I think most artists are happy that you are listening and enjoying their music on whatever system you have, whatever floats your boat.
2. Possibly more important: The reason I don't worry much is that I think it's just not hard to get the general intent of the artists music. That intent, that is the essential character of the music has, since recorded music became available, "translated" over countless different playback systems, from gramaphones, to cheap record players in teenagers rooms with records strewn all over the floor, to transistor radios on the beach in the 60's, to "boomboxes," walkmans, car stereos - you name it. What makes "Hey Jude" by The Beatles sound like Hey Jude comes through loud and clear on practically any system you are likely to find.
So I spend virtually no time fretting "Oh gosh, maybe I'm not hearing this precisely on the equipment the artists intends" since that modus operandi has, for the most part, never really been part of the dissemination of music.
I therefore have no problem nudging the sound of my system in the direction that makes me want to listen to more music.
This doesn't at all mean a perfect abandonment of the relevance of measurements. Clearly they can help people design equipment to more reliably reach the design goal. And clearly measurements can help understand how something sounds, and to a degree predict how something will sound. Generally speaking, I tend to prefer in speakers which exhibit fairly neutral, low distortion sound. It's not because I'm chasing "pure neutrality per se" but rather "a generally neutral speaker tends to sound better to my ears." If I'm too aware of certain colorations - e.g. if voices tend to reliably sound too chesty, muffled, or too sharpened etc, or if the bass has a homogenized droning character - this can be distracting for me. In many areas "lower distortion" just sounds better to me. However, once I've started with a decent speaker in that regard, I'm find nudging the sound a bit with a coloration that, to my ears, adds a bit without sticking out as obvious distortion, one that doesn't cover up the nuances of recordings.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!