Tom C
Major Contributor
Based on your comments, I expect I’m about your age, or perhaps the age of a younger sibling. So, I’ve been around about as long as you, and, from my perspective, the trend toward anti-subjectivism goes back to at least the 70’s. As I recall, that’s when companies began to be required to state amplifier power output and total harmonic distortion in standardized form. When I was in tech school in the late 70’s, the official teaching was that wires don’t matter as long as they can physically handle the voltage and current requirements, that transistor amplifier circuits typically have lower distortion than tube circuits, and so on. The engineers that I worked with at the time held these same ideas, back in the 70’s and 80’s. Marketing departments have been perpetuating notions to the contrary since that time. They want my money, and they will do what they can to separate as much of it from me as possible.If I may comment, I have been in the hi-fi hobby since the mid 70's. I've worked in the industry intermittently for four decades and as much as I try to digest the recent trend in anti-subjectivism I find it increasingly difficult to stomach. This nonsense that somebody can't possibly "hear" the difference between two components is nauseating. The idea that all DAC's should sound the same, nobody can detect anything above 44.1, cables don't make a difference, etc. unless you can prove it somehow in a double blind test with level matching is silly. I have cycled through so much gear over the past decades that I have long lost count. I can tell quite definitively and quickly if something sounds better or more to my liking than another piece of gear without much hesitation or concern. There seems to be this young school of "experts" that claim to know far more than they know and that get far more excited about measured performance than the actual sound of any given piece of Hi-fi gear. Cables make a difference (including digital cables) and no two phono preamps (especially phono preamps) sound the same. Careful and critical listening is just as much an acquired skill as is wine tasting, cooking or anything else in this lifetime. It used to be that the opinions of industry veterans were valued, as they should be but just as with most things these days we have a new crop of experts that haven't fully developed a sense of critical listening, never mind a sense of respectful communication. I have ordered a pp from Darlington Labs in part due to the organic, homegrown made in the USA nature of the business and in part due to the obvious level of build quality and design choices apparent as well as initial impressions from customers. I look forwrd to receiving and auditioning the unit.
It’s not a recent trend, and it’s not only younger people. It’s been around a long time.