The biggest shortcoming of subjective review is how adjectives describing tonal quality lacks any usable "degree". Let's take food reviews as an example because these are always purely subjective without measurements. When I say a food is "spicy, sweet, salty or too hot", the reader has zero context. What if I love spicy food and when something is "too spicy" for me that may also mean that if I think it's "just right" it could be too spicy for you. Alternatively, I cannot stand eating food that is a touch too sweet so when I complain that a drink is "too sweet", I know for certain my daughter would respond "no, it's perfect!" and so forth. Now on to sound - my wife and son cannot stand the sound of metal knives and forks scratching the surface of a ceramic dish as it literally sends shivers up their spines whereas I can hear it but am not bothered by it at all. So you see where I'm going here - the problem of subjective reviews is twofold:
(1) A "review" by its nature suggests that their subjective impressions are somehow universally applicable when in fact it's merely stating the reviewer's personal eccentricities, tastes preferences or biases, and even if the subjective impressions are a useful guide, the very words used to describe the subjectivity lacks any standard of measure; when a reviewer says there's an annoying bit of sibilance, we have no context of whether he's hyper sensitive to sibilance or not, and maybe 20 years ago he was hypersensitive but today he can no longer notice it unless it's punched up by 6dB! Many reviewers have been in this game for 20 years - have their hearing changed at all over the years? Absolutely - age, experience, injury - life happens.
(2) What if the reviewer chooses the wrong music and does not catch issues in the speaker simply because his musical selection does not bring out those flaws? We have Stereophile reviews where subjective speaker reviews are followed by JA's measurements and the two are not consistent - in this most recent
Stereophile review of the Alumine Three, Herb Reichert's glowing love for this speaker is at odds with John Atkinson's measurements (audible resonance near 1kHz):
HR: "the almost fullrange Alumine Threes made this type of music play bigger, more distinctly, more open, easier to follow, and more interesting than it did with my Falcons or DeVores…delivered a bigger "sound" fueled by more undistorted volume, more unrestrained dynamics, more absolute clarity, and of course, more and deeper and less distorted bass...I never imagined how much previously undelivered recorded information the Stenheim Alumine Threes would bring into my room. Or how powerful and compelling this newly discovered information would be."
JA: I was puzzled by the resonant peak in the port's output and by the small peak/dip just above 1kHz, but to be fair, any audible consequences of these resonances will depend on the music being played. [emphasis added]
And so ultimately, subjective reviews are limited to the reviewer not knowing what music to play in order to bring out the best or worst in a speaker and if you the prospective consumer happen to play the wrong music, well, , don't blame the reviewer because he didn't catch it with his selection of esoteric audiophile review music.