The real issue for me lies with the subjectivist/objectivist dichotomy and how to deal with it. For me it's simple, I know enough history to understand the concept of discovery and refinement, the forward progress of knowledge. I sure as hell know enough physiology and psychology to know that despite the fallibility of our senses what we are able to hear is justly offset by the huge signal processing power of our brains.
I don't think we have any issue with measuring what we hear, but we are a million miles away from being able to process those measurements into what we recognise as aspects of music- and that's where pure objectivism falls down for me.
So it can't be black, or white it has to represent the shades of grey if we choose to head in that direction. There's no device to measure how well someone plays, how much more emotion they capture than another musician, all we have are measurements for the simple things that really don't matter because all gear does those well enough already- yet none of us have found audio perfection.
I'd argue that if the electronics (leave speakers aside for the moment) can be shown to have very low distortion, super flat responses, ample channel separation, no phase errors within the audible range etc etc.... in other words , excellent performance that is easily obtainable today, your brain has ample information to do all the fancy processing that you mention.
I would also argue that if you've an amplifier such as Self's recent designs where distortion is driven down to 0.0005%, your brain cannot detect driving that down to 0.0002 or even raising it by a good deal. Same for other specs, so if channel separation iis 80dB then your brain processing abilities won't improve by taking that to 82dB. Similarly, response deviation of 0.25dB are going to immaterial. And so on.....
Of course you then have to ask yourself where the bar needs to be set for these issues to sink below audibility. That requires lots of blind testing along the lines of that done by Leak, Quad and the BBC Research Department many years ago. Harman are doing it today but many don't bother.
The norm today is to place, for example, two amplifiers on a table and play them in turn with no controls in place - nothing - and then expect a competent decisions to be made on the merits and characteristics of each.
That might be possible if they really do differ markedly (and measurably) but if they don't, and these days many amplifiers achieve good competency, then problems arise. You cannot possibly make an accurate assessment under those conditions. Yet people assume they can.
To give you a real example of this, in your comments on the new Linn phono stage you describe certain aspects of the sound and ascribe these to being typical of units using op amps. You are sitting in front of a unit full of op amps (which you described recently as the work of the devil) and then describing the sound as typical of such circuitry. Well it might be - but then again your opinion might be coloured by knowledge of the circuit design. That is by no means a criticism, simply an observation of a type verified many many times in other areas.
So introduce some objectivity into the listening tests. If after doing so you can still tell the unit apart from others and identify a preference - excellent, you've demonstrated how objectivity and subjectivity work together.
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