[radiowave]

Yes. Approximately no-one believes that we have definitive measurements of subjective sound, any more than we have definitive measurements of how good a painting is.

The key thing is the equipment owner's self-suggestion, vs. whatever adequately controlled blind testing would reveal.

I've done a small amount of audio restoration work, in which you're often trying to judge (e.g.) how much of a noise-removal process to apply. How much of that high-frequency content is just noise, or is there actually some of the original signal still lurking in there? Apply too much noise-removal and you'll take away some of that signal.

In doing this you frequently bump up against the question, "Can I actually hear a difference?" My rather sobering experience when I actually put it to the test was that I was way beyond the point of being unable to identify different treatments of the same audio, any more than could be explained by random chance, and yet I was still telling myself I could hear a difference.

[atoav]

Which is why some professional audio plugins offer a “blind”-mode where all interesting but visually distracting meters, spectra etc are switched off. This is also the appeal of analog gear, where suggestive metering is uncommon.