I'm going to disagree. The job of a reviewer is to express, as much as they are able, the nature and capabilities of the product they are reviewing and put it in context of what else is available. Their agreement or disagreement with the approach of the manufacturer and the result should be expressed separately. Ideally they should have a good awareness of the wants and needs of the people who may buy the product, so that they can point out potential good and bad aspects of the design or sound signature that potential buyers can determine if the product will suit them or not.
The whole "as the artist intended" thing is a red herring. The "artist" is most often the recording and/or mastering engineer. Singers are often in a box in the studio. Electronic and dance music? Quite a bit I have wasn't mastered with enough bass. As someone pointed out, sitting at the back of the hall the orchestra can sound very dull. Then if we add the complex acoustics of the ear at close range then we're basically talking about the impossible (though AKG's NQ90s attempt to get around this, at the expense of detail retrieval). If the only music we were listening to was Chesky's binaural recordings, your argument would have full merit. Unfortunately there is a world of music where "neutral" just doesn't work. If you really want your dead neutral, there's a pair of Sony monitoring headphones that will do the job (I forgot the model #) as well as a pair of "monitor" IEMs from their Justear division. Believe me when I say that you wouldn't enjoy listening to music with either.
I think we'er getting further off topic, but.... I think we both agree that one primary job of a reviewer is to describe what the component sounds like. Where we may disagree is what else a reviewer should include. If we take movie reviews, the critic pretty much always rates what they see, and often in verbiage that sounds fairly absolute, although it is obviously their opinion. So at least in that genre of reviews, an overall opinion, even as simple as thumbs up or thumbs down, is pretty much standard. In any case, in the absence of a review czar, the whole discussion is pretty moot, as an individual critic will put in whatever they want and can get past the editor.
I believe as a general rule that the artist always listens to what he/she/they have recorded, and have the final approval on the recording to be released. Thus, the artist is, at a minimum, passing judgment on the recording/mastering engineer's work and whether it meets their intent. Now, some artists concentrate on their performance much more than the sound itself. But there are stories about the Cleveland Orchestra recordings under George Szell - he used to demand gross boosting of the highs, until an engineer visited his home and discovered that he had placed his AR speakers (which tended to be treble shy to begin with) on the floor behind a couch. There are also stories of a violin soloist who wanted the recording to sound like what they heard at the violin, so the violin was front and center and the orchestra sounded like it was playing from the next county over. Obviously in these cases there was some negotiation with the musician and the recording engineer. And then there are records where the artist is the engineer, choosing and mixing samples to his or her taste. But AFAIK, I don't think that artists come in, record their parts, and let the engineer do all the mixing, EQ, etc, and then release the record without the artists listening to and approving the final mix - that's what I mean by the artist's intent. If you want to consider the engineer as a contributing artist, sure, but he/she is not the one making the music. And again, most recordings are mastered, balanced, and listened to by the artists, on loudspeakers, So tonally, I would think that a headphone that more or less duplicated the tonal balance of a relatively neutral loudspeaker would reflect the intent of the artists.
At least in the past with classical musicians, the musician had the final say, so, yes, "as the artist intended" is a real thing. I know there are several classical recordings that were not approved for release during an artist's lifetime that were released after, when they could no longer object. I imagine the same is true for other genres.
Now I don't listen to dance music, so I am assuming that what you say about their recordings is correct, although I don't know whether that is artist's intent, engineer's fault, or your personal preference. But if it is the latter, I would observe that one thing that modern electronics rarely has, and 1950s electronics always had, are bass and treble controls to modify the music to taste. If more amps had that, or parametric equalizer controls, I surmise that we would have less need to buy multiple transducers to remedy their absence. In other words, variable electronic tone controls is, IMHO, a superior solution to a transducer with a permanent built in tone control. Cheapo car radios have them, so why the hell not?
