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> Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones)

I don't think this has been true in my lifetime, at least. Some brands being known for "warmth" vs "brightness" is ages old, before the idea of audiophile earbuds was even a thing. At the extreme end, you can go back at least 40 years to see people with dedicated sub outputs and massively-oversized non-flat subwoofer setups.

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I know it's unintuitive, but that line of thinking is mostly wrong. Average sound preference converges towards neutral, cf https://www.audioholics.com/loudspeaker-design/measure-louds...

But well, that's about sound itself, not all the other stuff like design that people may care about in a loudspeaker.

Sure but they’ve always been mastered with the same setup, so the bar has not changed. And anything flavoured will not work universally for all types of music or other kinds of audio (like voice calls are really hard to understand with bassy speakers).

Mastering is done with the target in mind. There's tons of great videos by Masahiro Sakurai (Creator of Smash Bros.), one of which covers how they use typical household TVs to tune the audio/video for the game because relying on top-end audio/video equipment will result in worse results for the player.

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