You guys are talking about trade-offs and compromises. Strengths and weaknesses. That is why you can debate it.
The best audio gear has few to none. That is what distinguishes them from the rest. When your mind does not dwell on the sound of the gear and goes right to the music, you know something is right. When you find it difficult to describe the gear and only talk about the music and the listening experience, you know something is right.
This is why I posted those few descriptions of the super tables. Read what the listeners are writing. Their words are very revealing.
My own gear is modest and I don’t for an instance consider that any of the components I have are of themselves the best of their kind… I do believe that there is audio gear that are currently the best of their kind. I’d love to own that gear. The problem becomes mostly about validating that best.
I know how we’d approach it in training and assessment using validation process because in teaching we regularly work on assessment validation and the challenges to determining how you validate first what is sufficient and then how you determine what is a best example and for me this remains essentially the same process in assessing any design be it an architectural or in this case an industrial design.
You need to define what is being evaluated and work out how you then assess performance outcomes… so in terms of this what defines best, best at what specifically and what kind of assessment you are using to arrive at that best determination.
Subjective assessment is the dual balancing pole of objective assessment. Sure you can aim to be objective in the way you subjectively assess something but in terms of validated assessment objective usually means quantifiable and measurable and subjective refers to the experiential and qualifiable.
The best objective measurable performance is easier to validate as it is always about the parts (so familiarly in our context frequency response or measurable distortion) but as we have all long discussed there are also attached limits to how meaningful that can be.
With subjective assessment it can be holistic or about the parts and for me subjective whole assessment that includes subjective assessment of the whole and of recognised parts is better than either alone. Subjective assessment of parts alone without a summative whole reflection for me is simply less valuable and incomplete as subjective assessment. I’m quite happy to live with simple whole subjective assessment on its own.
So to say that something is the most natural sounding when replaying live acoustic instruments or that something presents the most realism are subjective holistic assessment involving synthesis of experience and that can be valid and can stand alone as evidence but only within the defined limits of that evidence. Increasing data points by having a greater number of respondents agreeing then adds range to the validity of that subjective assessment.
To break performance down into parts is needed in subjective analysis, to make a subjective call on the whole requires experiential subjective synthesis. That is the most essential way we experience things and involves being able to identify rightness.
I guess what I am pointing to is for me it’s fine to make any assessment in the end but each of itself does have strengths and weaknesses as approaches (or constraints). Without experiencing any of the things being referred to as best doesn’t preclude secondary evidencing and assumption that some people may be more right and others less likely so.
I have a bucket list of experiencing what may well be best just unfortunately don’t own any of it myself. I like it when people explain to us why they think that something is best and happy to form my own understanding out of that. No harm no foul in any claim to what’s best if it’s genuinely believed and authentic. In subjective terms we can all largely believe what we choose to believe. Though in some things I take comfort in the unknown but believe it’s better to have some beliefs than to have none.
