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Upon reflection, I have an anecdote that's somewhat similar to Thorsten's story, albeit a bit less extreme. Quite some time ago, a friend of mine of a more subjective persuasion loaned me an amplifier-DAC combo unit which he was quite fond of to listen to, to see if my ears were really made of tin. Vaguely intrigued, I used it for about a month, doing a few (sighted) level-matched listening tests, per his suggestion. I never discerned anything meaningful in the sighted tests to justify dragooning someone else in to swap cables for an A/B/X test, and I didn't bother to measure the unit before shipping it away as I had thought its specifications were fairly well-documented.
Some time later, another friend of mine took some measurements of a similar unit to the one I couldn't differentiate from a clean DAC and amp, ostensibly an updated version, and found that in addition to perilously high distortion harmonics, it was prone to some truly eccentric digital conversion malfunctions - I think that on Amir's preferred SINAD metric it would have scored about 50dB, possibly a bit worse. Apparently either the unit my friend had was better than its successor, or 50dB of SINAD is plenty for someone not expecting to hear a difference
Some time later, another friend of mine took some measurements of a similar unit to the one I couldn't differentiate from a clean DAC and amp, ostensibly an updated version, and found that in addition to perilously high distortion harmonics, it was prone to some truly eccentric digital conversion malfunctions - I think that on Amir's preferred SINAD metric it would have scored about 50dB, possibly a bit worse. Apparently either the unit my friend had was better than its successor, or 50dB of SINAD is plenty for someone not expecting to hear a difference