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Here is the problem with this analogy.

I'm going to use your text here. When you say "not well engineered" when talking about an aircraft, the plane might have handling problems, structural problems and so on. In other words it is not able to meet the requirements of dealing with flight.

The problem you are dealing with in audio has to do with the human ear/brain system, which is in effect the equivalent of the air that a plane has to deal with (music being the other part of that- the analogy isn't perfect but it does work).

The fact of the matter is that amps that 'measure well' don't do the best when dealing with the human ear/brain perceptual system. What they do well is look good on paper. The problem here of course is we don't experience music through paper, we experience it through our ears and brain.

When the audio industry ignores the human hearing perceptual rules, it is ignoring some fundamentals! Its like not getting the airfoil right on the aircraft- pretty basic stuff.

But as an industry we do it all the time and think nothing of it. For example, its been known since the 1930s that the 7th harmonic causes a metallic hardness in audio reproduction and also that it does not have to be at a particularly high level to do that. In fact during the 1960s General Electric showed that the 7th harmonic plays a role in our ability to hear how loud a sound is- IOW the ear/brain system uses the 7th and other higher ordered harmonics to gauge sound pressure. But we routinely ignore that information too.

So when we measure the wrong things, all that happens is that amps continue to look good on paper but don't always sound good in practice. Not only that but amps that don't measure all that well might continue to sound good. We've been having this discussion now for over 35 years- how long do you think it will continue before we come around to the idea that we have to measure what is important to the human ear rather than the things that don't matter?

The bottom line here is when an amplifier is built to look good on paper, its doing much the same thing that the Volkswagon cars were doing- cheating on the exam. What is really important is what it does in real life- how well it makes music to the human ear. If its not designed to do the latter, its 'not well engineered'.

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