So perhaps they show themselves better at discriminating against known differences (who chose the differences and why?), perhaps more repeatably and reliably - less 'noise'.
But a piece of test equipment would be superior on these counts by orders of magnitude. Why don't we ask it what its preference is?
I think preference testing can have a role to play in things which go beyond "straight wire with gain", where there's no clear rational answer as to how one should do it. That could mean things like speaker directivity and stereo vs multichannel, for example, or dry vs lively acoustics. Still, nothing wrong with just trying out different things (omni vs narrow directivity or stereo vs multichannel), and see what one personally prefers. As for fidelity to the signal in the electronic domain - EDIT: And the basic strive for speakers to be linear in all aspects - I see no need to go beyond measurements.
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