Well done test....If we want to caricature two opposite crowds of gear fetichists, one more obsessed by their experience of a branded name product and the other by measuring tools... All that without taking into account the acoustic/psycho-acoustic experience, experiment and process...
An audio system is experienced in a room by different brain/body system....
I dont have opinion about many of these questions...
I am not an objectivist for sure , nor any of the other two categories...
I am a correlativist, someone whose score cannot define him, because i am for a continuous listening learning process ( subjective) within an objective settings... The difference between inbetweenism and correlationist is the difference between static position and an evolutive scientific one taking subjectivity to be the basis and starting point and end point ... Objective measures and settings in the middle...
For some questions , none of the two possible answers make sense to me at all , for example:
2:
a: tubes (valves) are relics and belong in a museum.
b: tubes (valves) are more musical sounding.
Berning ZOTL technology use of tube make impossible for example to be in one of these 2 categories...And a S.S. amplifier can be made to sound like tubes amplifier anyway....Sansui did it decades ago...
it is stupid alternative like the false debate, analog/digital one with a meaningless forced choice...analog and digital gear and format are convergent complementary tools...
3:
a: I trust my ears over measurements.
b: hearing is easily fooled.
Same thing for the third question.... The two affirmations are true at the same times for a "correlativist" who think subjective starting point must be objectively test ( not necessarily always by impractical blind test procedure proposed by objectiivist fanatic)
4:
a: Auditive memory is (very) short and unreliable.
b: I can remember exactly how my rig sounds.
Same thing here with this false alternative...These two alternatives dont say all the story about music memory, but hide this complex story, for example the way sound impressions are stored through emotions in the learning body/brain; they are not stored at short term like reproductible data but stored long term like meaningful conditioning and positive learned biases which emerge when the same sound conditions are encountered.....
OK ....
it is well done test and fun to read, but useless to understand anything, save to position two groups which are opposed and wrong at the same time precisely because they oppose each other without understanding each other......
No reference to acoustic and psycho-acoustic science here at all only 2 groups focused on their attitude about the GEAR perceived to be the source of the sound experience without taking into account acoustic/psycho-acoustic importance...
The sound we experience dont come from the material gear ALONE by itself, but from the embeddings of the gear in a specific mechanical, electrical and acoustical/psycho-acoustical working dimensions TOO...
Fine tuning and optimizing these embeddings is the crux of an audiophile experience, not our subjective tastes only about the gear or the electrical tools we choose to analyse the gear...
