This is an appropriate thread to come back to. Marco sent me an email the other day to ask if I had left for good (thanks for thinking of me Marco). I hadn't, but the truth is that this thread gets to the heart of why I lost interest for a bit.

I think some of you have probably figured out that I'm more or less in the camp that believes in testing and audible limits, believes that once you get past the competence of the top of "mid-fi," a term I really don't even accept as valid, or the entry level of "high-end," a term I think has more to do with cost than performance, the differences in electronic kit are minute, and that the secret of life is plenty of headroom behind transducers that make your ears happy. Period.

And that's not really were AOS lives. This is a high-end board, and while I'm cool with anybody getting their bliss in any way that works for them, once I've said that....

a) I believe plenty of clean headroom in the transducers that make your ears happy is all that really matters.

b) If you have a $2,000 DAC (substitute appropriate pounds or dollars for amps, preamps, cd players, etc) you're listening to (at least) $1500 worth of psychological bias.

c)...and this one is rough...redbook cds and solid state are demonstrably, measurably superior to vinyl and valves.

....I've more or less said it all. And if you respond that you're hearing things that can't be measured, that ears are infinitely more sensitive than any measurement equipment, more telling than any listening test methodology, that my kit is not resolving enough to hear what you hear, that you'll trust your ears, thankyouverymuch, you've more or less said it all.

At that point we can either get into the kind of destructive tit for tat, false objectivism and self-proclaimed elitism this thread is about and that this board has avoided, or we can agree that it is all subjective, my kit is better than yours if I enjoy it more and vice versa.

And silence falls over the board.

Tim