If a $80k watch or turntable makes you happy, then that’s great for you. The reason the science matters here is because most people don’t necessarily have a ton of money to waste, and aren’t necessarily trying to recreate a historical reproduction of some old records (along with all their flaws); most people just want to listen to their favorite music and have it sound the best it can for a reasonable price. This is where the science has the definitive answers, with the potential exception of really old recordings with various quirks due to the lack of well-established audio recording and reproduction science at the time. But digitizing such old works involves some creative art in trying to recreate the authentic old sound when played on modern speakers, and this can be done well (and is done well, in some but not all cases).

But for example, there is no magical difference between a good studio monitor and good audiophile speakers. The differences are well understood and easily measurable. Studio monitors are often more neutral and flat, but also may tend to have a narrower beam, while audiophile speakers often have wider beams and perhaps some coloration like bass boost and treble boost or reduction.

What’s great about the science is it removes all this subjective guesswork. For example, my Genelec 8351B’s out of the box sound too bright for my tastes. But thankfully their built-in DSP allows me not only to calibrate them to perfection to my room, but tune the overall sonic signature to my preference (a gentle downward slope, for a warmer sound). The beauty of good speakers is you can do this in software, rather than buying a different pair of speakers.

About the only thing you can’t tune in software with good speakers is the beam width (assuming there are no flaws like directivity mismatches, distortion, etc. which can never be fixed in DSP). And that’s why e.g. my Genelec still sound different from my Revel speakers: the Genelec are medium width beam, while the Revel are very wide.

Depending on the music genre, this matters. I prefer the wider beam sound on older music and more traditional “audiophile” style music, so for that I tend to prefer the Revels. But for newer music, I and almost everyone else prefers the Genelec’s presentation. It’s important that this is not some subjectivist mystery: it completely makes sense, and through this understanding we are empowered to engineer or select the best speaker for the job without making it unattainably expensive or impossibly convoluted via subjective claims.