Hey John, thanks for pitching in. I'm afraid I may be a lost cause, but here goes...
From a practical standpoint of "what components should I buy?" the answer is absolutely "yes."
Anyway, that's why tube amps traditionally sounded so good. They had distortion, but it was conveniently located one octave higher and lower.
Aha!!!! I knew it was some kind of imperfection (aka "magic") ...that everybody just happens to
love.
So the difference between a DAC with a SINAD of 95dB and one with 97dB is not going to be terribly audible.
Okay, I'm feeling a little woozy, but I haven't passed out yet. ;-D But seriously, I'm interpreting your point as: a 2dB difference in distortion readings (?) is going to be a very small part of the "supposed to be there" soundscape...particularly if the volume is only at 3, instead of (wait for it) 11.
Because this is A
SR, please note: I'm setting aside the math for the log scale on the dB meter. I know it's there, but I don't know how to factor it into a sliding scale anyhow, which must be part of the point being made here and elsewhere... To put it in other terms: If you have to start the sentence with "at the margin" then we gotta do the math. Otherwise, we can just do economics, "...all other things equal." (Sorry y'all. I couldn't walk by an opportunity to conflate math and economics! ;-)
On the bright side, you can get a hell of an audio system for under $2000, or even under $500. Megabucks systems are really all about chasing that last few percent, and you never really get to perfection anyway.
Now this was the meat of my wish... I'm suggesting that the whole thing should turn commodity after a hundred years. The Katana DAC review seems to show a device that is completely transparent. I went shopping, and with all the doodads, it's $429. I'm in.! Now I need the cheapest transparent speakers... On another thread (I'm loosing track now) they mention studio monitors that I priced at $18,000/pair. Mmmmoookay... KEF LS50W come in at $2300 or so, but they don't move enough (?) air... I feel sure I could get the guys over at Allo to build me a pair of transparent speakers if they thought there was a market for them... No?
(By the way, the secret sauce for those $18,000 speakers seems to be that they use "
square wire" to wind the coils behind
their paper cones, while everybody else is using
round wire!!! (I wonder if they are alumni of Spinal Tap's studio team, come to think of it.)
So the point I'm trying to make is that the market for sound gear should be "winner take all" because "transparent" can be measured. It's a binary isn't it? Why buy "less than transparent" gear, ever? (Assuming transparent gear does exist.) We can even have the "money is no object" vs. "budget" argument, once we can establish that transparent is really a thing...
Based on what I've read so far, I'd almost argue that there's a consensus for what "transparent" means, at least on this forum...
So then, give me the cheapest transparent units in each type of widget (speaker, amp, ...and we already have the DAC) and that is the only system anybody ever needs to buy. Mystery cleared. (I actually mean this setup to be a question. I put in the form of a statement so that you can pick it apart in a way I can understand -- one assumption at a time. ;-)
...And I'm assuming we can measure the dirty room into which our clean system will go. That is, because we do science here we can nail down the difference between one root cause and another, including calibration of test instruments. Either that, or wake me when I can get recreational cochlear implants.
To your point,
@JohnBooty: we've been goofing around with Edison's phonograph and Bell's (?) microphone, and um, the Italian guy's radio... for a hundred years. It's like cars, as you said: by about 1930, literally all of the widgets we use in cars today had been invented. From 1930 to now we've added ...that's right: intermittent windshield wipers! Hey, it's wave propagation! And the waves move slowly. No need for relativity of either kind! The Wright brothers figured out how to test and describe some key properties of air in order to fly through it. How hard can it be to describe the soundboard of a piano or a guitar? (On the other hand, I think we are indeed still waiting on those cochlear implants for people who seriously do need them. And I did see a news item that somebody has finally found that "Rogue Waves" really do exist, and they're more frequent than anybody guessed, and the wave models have got nothing on them. ...Maybe my climb out of ignorance is going to take me a while. ;-D)
I promise to post more seriously in future. I guess I'm starting with "keep it simple" to see how far away from "simple" we truly are... So far, DACs are simple. $400 for Katana and done. Looks like voodoo everywhere else. (And I really did get to this from "what to test next" because I'm assuming that what we've tested in the past has been informative about which profiles are junk and which transparent.)