So while we all consume their output, microphones are entirely a professional product. And the audiophile community just eats whatever it is given, without analysis or comment.
With so little control over the start of the process, and with recordings subject to so many distortions deliberate and inadvertent, what does it mean to say that our systems are "accurate?" Of course one system, or one component, can be a more accurate reproducer than another. But it is at least arguable that accuracy of signal reproduction may not be the right criterion. I am reasonably certain it is not the only one.
The System As Music Maker
Let us think for the moment of our systems not as electro-mechanical devices, but as musical instruments. This is not farfetched. Consider a piano transcription of a symphony. We do not play these, but four-hands versions were widely available for amateur music-making in the days before recordings, when pianos and playing them were features of the enlightened middle-class home. Or consider Bach's Musical Offering, which can be played on virtually any instruments. The different versions will sound very different, but they are the same composition, and they convey the same musical emotions. This is equally true of a comparison between the usual modern Messiah, even a small one like Davis', and the lovely original instrument version of McGegan (HMU 907050.52): they sound very different, they differ in emotional detail, they have a different musical impact. Yet the reverence and devotion are the same. And if your eyes don't at least glisten at "He shall feed His flock" or "For unto us a child is born" on either version, get a home theater and watch Arnold movies instead.
By this token, we might think of our systems not as making the vain attempt to reproduce the absolute sound of the real instruments in a real hall, but rather as producing a different, yet still valid presentation of the same underlying musical composition.
This would seem to be a standard of unabashed subjectivity. Yet any judgment of music is inherently subjective. This is not to say that everyone's opinion is entitled to equal weight, much less that no comparative judgments are possible. The authority of a Tovey is very different from that of a Leonard Bernstein or Charles Rosen, yet each of these great performer-analysts is recognizably profound and far above common opinion. There is no "objective" standard by which we can rank Mozart ahead of Spohr, or Beethoven above Rossini, but their contemporaries and all who have followed have been able to tell the difference.
Judging audio components and systems as musical instruments would require us to thoughtfully consider what systems should sound like. Obviously they should sound the way music sounds in its natural state. But we don't have systems that really do that. And the ways to approach "natural" sound will cause some debate. I, like most of us, keep reaching for more detail, more resolution; yet I also know that any system that sounds sharper than the concert hall, that loses the sonorous richness of reality - no matter how accurately it reproduces the signal it is fed - is not musical, and is inferior to a system that produces, even through distortion of the signal, a more mellifluous and balanced sound.