I knew TAS (the magazine And the staff) decently well at one time, and I am hard pressed to remember them suggesting to anyone that their dac was "obsolete," just because of a new technology on the horizon.
And not all of us who have/had state-of-the-art systems are part of the 1%. I’d bet most of us AREN’T. It's just that the joy of music is paramount to us, instead of a skiing trip to Gstaad.
Although, come to think of it, it would appear my ears (old as they are) are in some alternate '1%' because, to me, it is not all that common that even some very good components recreate acoustic instruments (orchestral has the most variety) tonally correctly. I listen to digital, but to my ears, there are tonal differences from how they sound in the symphony halls I go to. Vinyl sounds more like a symphony hall.
But then, most people aren’t listening to classical. And TAS, at heart, is a magazine based on music acquired in the vinyl age (1940-1995), and based almost exclusively on classical music. That’s what is (mostly) used for reviewing purposes, although other genres have appeared in the magazine.
