You have so misrepresented the research, including who did it, that your grasp is close to zero. Welcome to ASR. If you have come with good intentions ie to learn, and you care enough about this topic to post on it, I commend to you to purchase and read, not skim, Sound Reproduction by Dr Floyd Toole, either the first or third edition.
There is a baseline for quality of audio from reproduction gear: the natural sound of a live voice, guitar, piano, etc. Almost nobody with good hearing listens to these natural sounds and thinks, “Sounds bad. If only I could hand them a microphone connected to my favourite amp and speaker that I know sounds good.” The research shows that there seems to be a universal preference for sounding uncoloured compared to natural sounds. Which should be no surprise, when we give it some thought.
The research shows that there seems to be a universal preference for sounding uncoloured compared to natural sounds.
So the Harman studies found that 100% of all participants preferred the Harman curve?
If they did, then I stand corrected.
If they did not, then the Harman studies are
1. Categorizing subjective preferences in the population
2. Picking the largest category (i.e. the best target to hit if you want to sell speakers to the broadest demographic possible)
3. Assigning verifiable objective metrics to those subjective preference categories which
describe those subjective preference categories in a way that makes them implementable consistently in equipment.
Which is incredibly useful (I happen to fall into the percentage of the population that has a subjective preference for the Harman curve as well, and want to know, objectively, whether audio equipment I might want to buy aligns with the Harman curve, and therefore my subjective preferences!).
But that's not the same thing as as "objectively good sound" - that's "objectively likely to be popular sound" or "objectively likely to be a sound I will subjectively prefer".
There is no definition of "objectively good sound" - much like there can be no definition of "objectively best colors" or "objectively best smells" in a global sense.
The most we can say (and the most any of the Harman studies say, because they're no stranger to scientific studies, and are not idiots) is that "we have observed that
most people in our sample group tend to prefer this set of measurements" - which is correct, and true, and useful - but does not give you an objective yardstick for "sounds good" in a global sense. It gives you a useful target to hit that, statistically speaking,
most people (not all) will subjectively prefer.
It gives us a way to categorize and measure our subjective preferences, which is useful for helping all of us communicate our shared subjective preferences, to the degree we have them.