Honestly, I'm not trying to capture the "artist's intent," because I don't know how to achieve that. Maybe find out what equipment their recording studio used to listen to the music before they said "OK let's call this cut final I like the sound" - same speaker, knobs, everything. Maybe that captures their intent perfectly?

Every artist & recording studio is using different gear with I assume slightly different sound signatures. Who can really tell what the exact intent ever is?

All we can know for sure, are the instructions given to us in the form of the music file - whether that's some CD, streamed file, flac, or whatever, it's just a set of instructions for our gear to make noises.

By whatever means it's encoded & interpreted, the music file says something like "play this frequency, at this volume, at this time" a ton of times, and our gear follows those instructions and makes the music that we hear. The more "accurate" or "transparent" our gear is, the closer we are to following the instructions of that music file exactly as it is.

In a perfect room with perfect equipment, you could have a music file, play it on your super good speakers with a recording microphone between them, and the recording file captured and translated by the microphone would be bit-for-bit perfectly identical to the source file. None of that captures the artist intent perfectly, but it could capture the file perfectly.