Best Forum to hear experienced audiophiles exchange thoughts?

@jeffseight What else have you tried and what did you find lacking, there?

@mike_in_nc 

I’m someone who thinks that room acoustics are > 50% of the sound and that boutique cables are way, way, way down on the list of things worth spending money on if good sound is your objective.

Agree with you 100%. Many just either can't or don't want to go to the trouble of dealing with room acoustics. A bad room is in direct collision with what good sound actually requires. The result is that many are forced into bad faith -- in other words, they insist that this or that factor (or component) makes a big difference, when in fact they have excluded the room and just become more emphatic to compensate.

People with experience and knowledge tend to write in a way that exhibits that. I've started many threads here, and when my OP was carefully worded, the responses would typically lead to a coherent and informative exchange of views. This does not always happen but it frequently does. Check my threads to see what I mean.

The other thing an OP can do is to steer conversations back on track by restating the question or by summarizing what's been said that answers it. 

In other words, a good thread takes work and some minding by the OP. When people throw a vague question out there and then find they're in the middle of a food fight, that's not totally their fault but there's some need for additional due diligence.

It’s simply very difficult to gauge where someone is on their journey, or to explain in objective terms what you’re subjectively hearing...I suspect that’s one of the reasons people lean on measurements, which brings us back to the many variables and perspective involved in audio.

@knotscott -- very much appreciated your survey of the variety of psychological factors at work. It's so tricky for folks to engage a subject matter that is physical on one hand (electricity, acoustics, etc.) and psychological on the other (description, interpretation, evaluation). 

One thing this hobby lacks is a well-known and standardized vocabulary for sensory experience. Without that, we have no "Rosetta stone" to communicate about what we are experiencing with this or that component. Even if we had a standard vocabulary, we might still disagree about what sounds "better" or "worse,"
but without some way to designate an experience which is significantly similar, we often wind up miscommunicating.

@mahgister Thank you for your kind words. Nice to see you back. You have a unique perspective and voice, and you have done experiments which most people have not even dreamed of! Imagination is such an important component to this hobby, and you have a cornucopia of imagination!