Rob, understanding the complexities of acoustics and audio I have spent a long time and a lot of discussions with friends who work or have worked in the recording industry as mixing engineers, pressing engineers or speaker designers. I, like they, have come to the conclusion that no HiFi in the world will ever replicate:
What the musicians heard on their IEM's / Studio Monitors
What the Mixing Engineer Heard on his Cans / Studio Monitors
What the Mastering Engineer heard when he finished the studio Master
What the pressing engineer heard when he made the Master Pressing
Each one of the steps adds or takes away from the process and hopefully at the end of it, you have music that everyone agrees is good.
Now unless you have the same electronics and speakers / headphones as each of the engineers, it is going to sound very slightly different. So now we get to Joe Blogs with his HiFi. Joe can either enjoy the audio for what it is, on his system and get his system to sound like HE wants it to sound or he can go down the science route and try and use test tones try and get the most neutral sounding system in the world (which he will probably hate listening to) but he can claim reference levels of reproduction. And therein lies the rub. Studio Reference monitors with a +/- 3dB frequency response and a very neutral sounding system are wearing to listen to and not very exciting.
Having done many hundreds of hours of sitting with a precision SLM taking readings and trying to analyse the reason for certain acoustic characteristics of a room or system I am not inclined to try and analyse my HiFi's frequency response as I know its poor. What I do know is that it sounds nice to my (damaged and poor hearing) and I enjoy it. I like a 3dB boost on my higher frequencies to compensate for my hearing loss, I like a 3dB boost on my 100Hz down as it is more akin to concert PA sound, in fact I quite like a Vee shaped sound (as do many people - psychoacoustically its more pleasant to listen to)
So to conclude as much as I understand the Maths and Physics and how to use a Precision SLM or 1/3 Octave Spectral Analyser to actually understand what is going on; when free field analysis is preferable to near field; how to use Sones and Phones (which nobody ever talks about but are more important than dB); how to calculate the resonant frequency of a room at a given wave-length I actually choose not to. I want to enjoy the music and not the hifi and how my music makes me feel and interacts with my life. Please dont get me wrong, I love great sounding hifi, as long as it sounds like I want it to, not to how a B&K 2250 tells me how it should sound.