Because there is no technical accuracy it is indeed a misnomer. As it's commonly used around audio objectivism, accuracy is a misleading assumption that makes artificial distinctions. It says this is accurate but that is not accurate when technically neither can be. Instead it is a subjective opinion of that data or state or condition.Accuracy in audio, is a misnomer. Accurate to what, a live performance in a specific location experienced from a specific seat in the venue? Accurate to what's heard in the studio through via the speakers on the mixing desk? From the seat at the control desk in the mastering studio?
As the last hand in the tiller in production I guess it's the mastering engineer's experience that were trying to match, but we have no way of knowing what that was so we have to settle for accurate to the signal on the recorded media as distributed.
On the other hand, it's been rightly said that hearing a sufficiently refined playback induces an involuntary reaction in a listener. As others have said in this thread, that sense is why we do this. We have an innate, undeniable sense of what real sounds like and as we advance toward it our subconscious will naturally tell us.Now there's a myriad of metrics for measuring that accurately, none of which the ear is capable of doing. All the listener can say is whether they like/prefer the outcome.
Ears aren't a measuring device, and any claim otherwise is just hyperbole. The statement "this sounds more accurate to me" is utterly meaningless.
One of objectivism's odder positions is that better sound stems from making one of those faulty, data-driven decisions because the ear is so incompetent and faulty that it cannot be trusted. Unless objectivism isn't about sound at all, which many of us are beginning to conclude.
While the misnomer "accuracy", as a projected, very limited "objective" technical data framework, has little place in the analysis and while it leads some to incorrect conclusions, hearing is undeniably the goal. "This sounds more accurate to me" is therefore the only meaningful gauge there is; after all what are we serving? Why uniquely in audio must we reject human feedback when it serves everywhere else?