About "experts"...I have personally come to the conclusion that in audio, a certain dose of skepticism towards "expert" opinions is healthy.
There are many reasons for this:
- obviously, sometimes people have an agenda, and vested interests
- we do not all have the same expectations, and we are not all sensitive to the same aspects of audio reproduction (and no system does it all). Individual preferences are not always clearly stated.
- The experts are the ones designing the systems (hopefully). There is little expertise involved in assessing components, and little expertise involved in connecting an amplifier to a pair of speakers (though some aspects, such as room acoustics, require some real expertise). Some people have more experience than others, but they may not have a better understanding of audio. They may have formed some convictions, but these are largely circumstancial.
- it is difficult to assess a single component within a system because its performance may be affected, and limited, by other components/aspects of the system
- objective data (measurements) is of limited use