Audiophile Guru Syndrome

[tima]

Do you think I should just be quiet and not offer this sort of advice?

No. However my sense of this from reading discussions is that giving the same advice over and over when someone talks about SETs turns people off.

I did start a thread like you suggested. It got a few likes and no other activity. The message obviously isn't going to get out that way

What counts as "the message getting out"? What do you want or expect to happen? Do you believe people must take your advice or express belief in it for you to be successful?

 

[microstrip]

There is a lot of that kind of petulance going around...

Interestingly, in his book Sound Reproduction — an opus much revered in objectivist circles, and an objectively excellent work — Floyd Toole (with Sean Olive and Todd Welti) notes that “listeners are the final judges of what constitutes good sound (…) so it is worth trying to understand what they are hearing.” (That’s from memory, not a literal quote.)

I was happy to read someone knows about Sound Reproduction, written by Floyd Toole, not Olive or Welti, a book revered in both objectivist circles and knowledgeable subjectivist circles. Unfortunately your memory is deceiving you - Toole never wrote the text you refer in his book.

He writes however something with similar words stating that listeners, in blind conditions (non biased), are "excellent detectors of artifacts and distortions; they are remarkably trustworthy guardians of what is
good. Having only a vague concept of what might be correct, listeners recognize what is wrong" - curiously I have quoted the whole sentence before. Surely the strict need for non biased, blind conditions excludes the high-end.

In other words, even if a particular measurement suggests that Device X should provide all the sound quality anyone could need, it’s still important to consider why some listeners choose something else — and what they’re actually hearing that leads them to that preference.

As far as I remember this was never addressed in the book. Toole does not care about audiophile individual preferences - they are not his objective.