Personal taste vs. scientific experimentation maybe? Chalk it up to the fact that we (humans) have a hard time describing things in complete factual ways exactly the same as the next person. We interject emotion (even into audio) as to how we perceive sound. We may even have differences in our own physical abilities to hear things the same... Hearing damage, larger ears, smaller ears, elvish ears.... Oh wait... Familiarity with certain sounds makes us more or less "sensitive" to certain sound frequencies...
If you can take a speaker and set it up in a room that doesn't "color" the sound, and you set all of the controls to be flat, the target goal is to have a perfectly even/flat frequency response out of the speaker. That is the ideal...
However, again, interject that we are human and not a bunch of carbon-based SPL meters with legs running around, and we inject our own human skew or perceptions into the audio. That is where the phrase "you can't always trust your ears" or some variant of that comes in. So no, you aren't dense, but yes, in some case you ARE hearing things... That is your personal interpretation of what something should sound like, or some frequency bias due to your room acoustics, etc... Heck, I know that my room is HORRIBLY injecting and removing frequency ranges from my setup. I have just been to busy (and/or lazy) to figure it all out since I think that my speakers still sound great. Some day I'll make the room stop battling with them and they will sound awesome...
