I no longer have the listening acuity that I once had, so my days of having firm opinions about one thing sounding “better” than another are behind me…like a wine snob with COVID whose sense of smell has gone away. But as a person retired from a 50+ year HiFi career, I have opinions, some based on what I used to be sure I heard. I know that some audio designers believe as Amir does that audio component accuracy can be reduced to transfer function and SINAD. What else is there, after all (they wonder)? But I used to hear “depth” and “spaciousness” in some things, and not others, where both easily met criteria for flat, extended bandwidth and THD and noise. I even had a preamp that sounded positively marvelous…unless you engaged the rumble filter, which collapsed the soundstage. The engineer who created that preamp may not have noticed, or even listened to it to find out. If .1%THD in an amp or preamp is “inaudible”, why is .0001 better? The ASR “less is better” approach doesn’t impress me. He does base his recommendations on an array of measures and does recommend many items that aren’t “the best”, but there is a Calvinistic aversion to luxury build quality and pricing (if not matched with top class measurements) that is appealing to the less affluent, perhaps younger, reader. I used to belong to the Boston Audio Society, and these debates between objectivists and subjectivists were just as entertaining then.
The Audio Science Review (ASR) approach to reviewing wines.
Imagine doing a wine review as follows - samples of wines are assessed by a reviewer who measures multiple variables including light transmission, specific gravity, residual sugar, salinity, boiling point etc. These tests are repeated while playing test tones through the samples at different frequencies.
The results are compiled and the winner selected based on those measurements and the reviewer concludes that the other wines can't possibly be as good based on their measured results.
At no point does the reviewer assess the bouquet of the wine nor taste it. He relies on the science of measured results and not the decidedly unscientific subjective experience of smell and taste.
That is the ASR approach to audio - drinking Kool Aid, not wine.