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An excellent post...

You rightly emphasize two things that everyone probably knows, but which are often overlooked, I think. (1) Excellence in hi-fi does not yield a single linear ordering (a single ranking, best to worst), because what is desirable in sound reproduction is not given a priori - different people will value different things. BUT this does not mean that it is all subjective, that there are not objectively or intersubjectively valid rankings etc; it merely means that there are many orderings (which may criss-cross in various ways). (2) The bottom line for engineering in any domain is, does it work? Does it do what we want (at acceptable cost, reliably etc.)? Our hi-fi world is infested with component or design-fetishism - this type of amp, this type of wire is absolutely the best. Fetishism, by definition, is the belief that certain properties are contained in some object which are not really contained in the object, but only in certain contexts in which the object occurs. One falls prey to it precisely when one is ignorant of the way in which the context works - eg, of the ways in which circuits actually work. It is easier to pick out some element and imagine that the magic is all contained in that. So for an amateur like me, all I can do is to be very sceptical of what anyone who is not a real engineeer says about hi-fi, except, at most, what something sounds like.

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