This thread is wandering into the tired old "round earth versus flat earth" territory, with the local outbreaks of inverted intellectual snobbery and slightly woolly thinking thus implied

. So let's just skip the tiptoeing around the subject and cut to the chase, shall we?
'Flat earth' and 'round earth' are two different fetishes, neither of which has anything to do with music, though they're harmless enough in their own ways. Being
fetishes, they're qualities of people rather than of equipment (it's always handy when thinking or talking about hifi to keep in mind the difference between people and objects). The 'round earth' fetish is well known, namely immediately impressive sound for its own sake: thus, only the 'best bits' of CDs get played, invariably at very high volume levels, and records are added to the collection or put on the player on the basis of their particularly deep basslines / jangly close-miked acoustic guitar / exaggeratedly centre-of-stereo-image closed-miked vocals / etc. The CD collection will often favour elevator 'jazz' from the record branches of Naim or Linn.
The 'flat earth' fetish, however, is a less-well-understood beast, and is an extension of the anthropomorphic thinking I've already mentioned a couple of times in the thread. This fetish ascribes human and/or mystical qualities to particular pieces of equipment, such that "music" is no longer a human phenomenon but one which can be possessed, produced or destroyed by a box of electronics. Sufferers cannot attain musical satisfaction in the absence of the fetishised object or in the presence of anti-fetishised objects (which in extreme cases includes microphones in concert halls or digital watches anywhere), and believe that some hifi kit cannot 'hold a tune' (a belief shared by remarkably few trained musicians and nobody with perfect pitch). At the logical limit are those who claim that their hifi is "more expressive" or "more emotional" than
live music - which I've actually seen written on a hifi forum, though mercifully not often.
Soundbite time: 'round earth' fetishises something that doesn't really matter, 'flat earth' fetishises something that doesn't really exist.
To return to the notional subject of the thread. Music indeed has an emotional dimension as (usually) the most important element. Because people feel an emotional attachment to music they tend to resist any attempt at understanding it, because of a barely-recognised fear that this might 'destroy the magic' (see
here for a simplistic example of an attempt at a discussion of some technical aspects of a particular album, which was received in a rather hostile manner in some quarters - though that could also be because it was written by some insufferable smug idiot with quasi-intellectualist pretensions

).
This anti-intellectual attitude to music then tends by association to spill over into an anti-intellectual attitude to hifi kit, with woolly thinking to the point where the distinction between the production and
reproduction of music becomes blurred - the road leading to the fetishisation of equipment known as 'flat earth'. For the record (pun not intended), music is produced by musicians, then is converted into a signal at the microphone. It remains a signal all the way across the transmission chain until it is converted back into music at the ear (for the present purposes - let's not get into wrangling about the auditory system today, shall we?

). Hifi is thus about transmitting signals and exists in the domain of engineering - not about creating music and thus in the domain of aesthetic philosophy. As titian has indicated, hifi is about getting the
sound right so you hear the same thing as you would in the concert hall - and obviously if you get the sound right, the music follows. The degree to which communication of the music depends on precise reproduction of the sound depends on both the music - tone-colour, dynamic range and sheer sonic spectacularness are perhaps more central to the experience of Respighi's
Pines of Rome than of Bach's
Goldberg Variations - and on the listener. I think that some people whose experience of "live" performance means amplified music probably find undistorted playback distracting because it's not what they're used to, but that's a different issue.
Trying to use terms like 'tune' and 'rhythm' to describe an amplifier is a near equivalent of trying to use terms like 'total harmonic distortion' to describe a violin, and is just as appropriate - ie. not at all.