A very pertinent question and one without specific answers I'm afraid. There are no standards of music recording, production, mastering or of recording studios. A recording studio can be anything from a converted garage with a few thousand dollars of recording equipment all the way up to multi-million dollar facilities. The top facilities spend more on just their Analogue to Digital Converters (ADCs) than a lesser studio might spend on the entirety of their studio! A recording engineer could be anything from a kid in a bedroom who has just taken a six month audio engineering course to a 30 year professional in a top facility. Same is true of producers and mastering engineers. I've met people who call themselves mastering engineers, who think you just have to slam the level and don't even know what the job of the mastering engineer is, let alone know how to do it well. Cheap technology has made once highly exclusive and specialized jobs accessible to almost everyone and has lead to a huge variation of quality in available music. What's worse is that the younger generation doesn't seem to care to much about audio fidelity, so why bother spending money on expensive experienced engineers and recording facilities?
There are some genres of music (mainly classical and jazz) where fidelity is still highly prized but even so, all recording and production is a balance of compromises. For example, microphones do not record sound the way that we hear it, so we may have to add some EQ (and/or other processing), EQ is not a linear process, so it's a trade off. Pretty much everything in the recording chain and playback chain introduces non-linearities, not to mention that we are trying to make a performance of maybe 100 different sound sources (musicians in an orchestra) sound realistic when played back by only two sound sources (speakers). Another consideration is that many instruments do not sound anything like you expect them to. For example, when you listen to a french horn (in a live orchestra) you are not really listening to a french horn, you are actually listening to the reflections of a french horn off a number of different surfaces, very big difference. Same with a drum kit, a live (un-amplified) drum kit is usually nothing like what you expect on a recording. Ultimately, it all comes down to the skill and artistry of the producer and mastering engineer and the environments they have to work in.
Although there is nothing you can do about any of this as a consumer, the OP question is pertinent. In a forum where so much discussion is based on subjective opinion, what are you basing your subjective opinion on, what music are you listening to? Has it been recorded, produced and mastered by top professionals with a substantial budget and high quality in mind or are there mistakes (EG. frequency holes, imbalances, distortion, etc)? When people say they like the "warmth" of a tube, the "air" of a cable or the "width" of speaker x, what are you listening to and what are you doing to the sound? On the one hand you may be improving a poor recording on the other, would you want go and look at a Picasso or a Turner wearing pink tinted sunglasses? Personally I go for transparency but that's just my opinion and off topic
G