Some music really is more of an intellectual exercise that you're supposed to sit down and work at. It doesn't have a groove, it only has intrigue. Much music, of course, is emotionally driven. Some music deliberately tries to pull you in all kinds of directions. So it depends on what I want to listen to at the time; all of these kinds of music have their place.
When I'm critically listening to gauge performance of the equipment, I have music with certain qualities, and which I know extremely well, and then I try to not get so lost in the music that I stop keeping track of what the electronics are doing.
Many of the reports here emphasize the findings in critical listening, because it's as close to factual and correlatable as we can manage, with our collectively vast range of musical tastes, acoustic tastes, head shapes, budget, and so on.
It actually takes very little, equipment-wise, to be totally lost in the music. In my college days I could get lost in the music just by listening to 90 minute cassette tapes on department-store console stereos, and I could now if that's all that was available to me. So reporting that listening to Keith Jarrett's 1973 Lausanne solo concert on some particular equipment brought me to a particular imaginary space filled with emotions, that is true but it is more of a review of the music than of the equipment. It's not all that helpful to you, especially if you're not a fan of improvised music. It's not particularly constructive either, because that can happen to me even if I'm listening to the recording on an FM broadcast through a clock radio.
On the other hand, if I said that I felt like I was sitting in the third row and could feel the physical presence of the piano and the concert hall around me, that is a criticism relevant to the equipment and may be helpful to you regardless of the kind of music you like.
