If you call terms like "bright", "hollow", "dry", "forward", "tubby" and "loose", "incisive" and "warm" as having value,
then I absolutely and most strenuously disagree. They have no value. None. Not a little, and not even an iota. There is absolutely
NO assurance that another person will hear the same thing the same way, and no assurance that another person will correlate what they hear with those words. There is also no assurance that another listener will use the same words, or anything like them, in an attempt to describe their experience.
The ability to transfer information that is useful is what makes the word "description" meaningful. How many times have you seen two people talking, and one said, "It's cold outside!", and then the other walked outside and returned, saying, "What? You're nuts! It's nice out there!"
The same with "hot" food. One person may say, "This burrito is hotter than hell!". The person alongside them might taste it and say, "Huh? Whaddya mean? It has a little flavor, but it's not hot."
Or take wine. One person says, "This wine is fruity, with a forward nose and authoritative body." The person after them would taste the wine and say, "Yecchh! This tastes like horse urine!"
All this confusion could have been avoided by using a little bit of correlation or reference to something objective.
In the instance of temperature, if the first one would have said, "It's 55 degrees outside" then the other could have correlated that to their own experience.
In the instance of spicy food, if the second person would have asked, " Do you mean like Pace Picante medium or Pace Picante hot, or even hotter than that?" then there could have been a correlation.
In the case of the wine, if even the
most basic of descriptions were used, such as, "I like sweet wines" or "I like acid wines," the misunderstanding would never have happened.
Allow me to modify your statement.
"To even make the case why descriptions should be relevant at all to a listener, you will have to at some point correlate "How It Sounds" to measurements, which will mean adopting objective references."
The point I'm trying to make is that subjective descriptions between two people
without correlation is not only without any value, but it's even worse than that; it can give the absolutely wrong impression to another person and cause them to condemn (in their own mind) the subject of the description.
Even in a person's unspoken mind, which is the only instance of subjective description being accurate, they might listen to two or three different speakers and formulate totally different descriptions compared to the people listening next to them.
Let's say someone gets a chance to listen to ..... oh, let's say a bookshelf speaker .... they might say, "OMG! Two months ago MattHooper said this had loose bass and forward mids, but I think it's totally fantastic! This is what I've been looking for! I wish that had understood what he had meant! Now I regret buying those Flammis Model XYZ speakers! I could have saved money and had a speaker I liked even more!"
Wouldn't it be better to describe matters along the lines of, "Yeah, this speaker sounds insufferably bright to me. It has a 3 dB plateau from 2 kHz on up. Do you hear it that way?" Or maybe, "This speaker sounds really incisive; it has the same bass/midrange imbalance as a Klipsch, and I like that." Then the other person, having heard Klipsch speakers, could relate. They could look up Klipsch measurements, and would know what to look for in the future when they saw other brands' measurement charts. They'd want to do that because they had heard the Klipsch sound, and they HATED it.
So no, .... no, no, no no and NO! Subjective language, which is un-quantifiable (and unreferenced), has no value. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nichts. None. Not a bit. The occasional occurrence of subjective language being of value to some person here or there is purely accidental, and not predictable.
And something that is unpredictable,
especially unpredictable when you really need to depend on it, is useless.
But heck ..... you can try to change my mind!
Jim