As I suspect Newbee correctly infers, I'm not sure that Uppermidfi's (great username) interpretation of my take is exactly what I had in mind. Nrchy and Newbee are essentially on target to point out that in almost any instance of listening to recorded music at home, an audiophile is going to be making subjective, impressionistic, and to a large degree fundamentally uninformed judgements about the verisimilitude of what they hear.
I'm not trying to argue for a 'standard' as such - there *is* one in some senses, but we can't really know it for ourselves - rather, I'm just trying to point out why some recording techniques are going to yield source material where the degree of fidelity of our systems, especially in certain areas, is more critically brought into play than with other types of material. What it boils down to is that if we are listening to material which contains relatively less information that has a correlation to reality, then it matters less that our playback system be able to convey such information. This is why dance music will sound better played back in a disco than classical music will.
But of course Uppermidfi is correct (and speaks for many of us) when he posits that in the universe of playback systems, there *are* those which are literally 'higher fidelity' than others (and vice-versa), and I think we all take it for granted that, at least in a gross sense if not precisely in every detail, we will for the most part be able to tell - whether or not we are intimately familiar with the source material, as long as it is of high sonic quality - pretty easily just by auditioning where a system falls on this scale, depsite having no 'absolute' reference to work from. Which, when you think about it, is a fairly complete description of why there is even a high end to begin with. And a fairly good defense as to why, no matter what arguments you might be able to come up with in theory about why it should not be so, the degree of fidelity to *some kind* of real acoustic event captured in the source material must be significant for audition purposes, regardless of our not having been present at the original performance. You can hear it, so it must be the case - even though both the recording and the playback system are never going to reproduce reality, in order to even stand a chance of getting any idea how close you might be coming, both aspects of the chain have to first attempt the feat.