What do "audiophiles" use to judge equipment?

Question posed by OP:

Are there any others who trust their own ears and go into a music store and BUY something without the psychological hand-holding of a forum or spec sheet?

Response by MC:

You are very confused.

Search through my posts. Highly recommended, highly educational.

OP's question dismissed out hand.  How dare you inquire whether you can just use your own ears and emotional response to the gear you're auditioning!  You're confused and the only antidote is to search MC's posts to give you the exact hand-holding that you'd deliberately like to avoid.  No one can do this properly just using his own ears....please go read everything ever written by MC and avoid such a costly mistake as trusting yourself.

@cmariner1  Robert Harley's well-known Complete Guide to High End Audio provides some very sensible approaches and considerations to purchasing components or a complete system.  He outlines very well the role that specs, reviews, speaker/amp synergy, dealers, listening, and individual needs/tastes play in making good decisions.  The reality is that there are a myriad of considerations that all do matter - some more than others.  I suggest starting with a guide like this and certainly not getting bullied into taking advice from "some dude" on the internet who publicly dresses you down by concluding: 

In short your "hypothesis" to the extent we can glorify it as such, bears at best a tenuous relationship with reality.

There you will find repeatedly stated the only two specs worth consideration are speaker sensitivity and phono cartridge output.

How anyone can utter such foolishness and also be taken seriously by even the few on this forum is beyond reasonable comprehension. Using this logic Robert Harley’s book should have been reduced from 596 pages to a paragraph or two.

When I inquired with Keith Herron a few years ago about matching his wonderful VTSP-360 preamp with my existing amp the very first question he asked was about my amp’s input impedance. Why would Keith have been the slightest bit concerned about such a meaningless spec? He apparently knows far less than other posters on this forum.

And why is Kevin Hayes at VAC so obsessed with the performance of his output transformers, putting tons of effort into his current delivery specs and optimizing power delivery into higher and lower impedance speakers? How misguided he must be.

Why does John DeVore believe that the entire load the speaker presents to an amp matters more than speaker sensitivity? He must be confused as well. I really don’t know how these guys ever managed to be so successful while being focused on specs that don’t matter at all.