the confusion and distortion so far, may be that the OP is innocently inquiring how a 'genuine audiophile' comes to conclusions about sound and he made the mistake of using the words 'audiophile' and 'genuine', when maybe it would be clearer to title the thread 'how does a professional...........'. Meaning how does someone making a living at reviewing come to their conclusions
and to that question, purpleangel gets it about right imo, in that to keep one's job as an expert reviewer, one better generally like or learn to like the current offerings from the highest paid suppliers.
But the rest of the answer is spelled out already in that it is a combo of science and art, graphs and listening. To my mind, graphs should be left to the people designing the headphone. Why a reviewer would need to see anything on paper to me discredits his hearing abilities. Since he is not designing and tweeking the headphone, only doing final real world listening, ears should always be the sole/soul judge and jury. Problem is the expert is an individual and has thier own tastes, so because of that, some graphs and charts can be helpful in his ability to write a more objective review and negate/balance some of the personal bias.
