Your initial poke was borderline ad-hominem that by associating us together as if we all think the same.
Now this post smells of a false dichotomy and finger pointing.
Someone asked about a crown amp and you brought your fallatious politics into it.
It seems to me, with all due respect and all that, your post count is a little light to be acting as a forum moderator. If you think a post goes over the line, report it. If you don't, then I would politely suggest more listening and less accusing. Also, your definition of politics seems a little...broad...unless there was editing after I read it.
It is very much accepted generally that while we admire good measurements, and denigrate poor measurements, the ability to hear the difference is quite unlikely if all we use are our ears. That requires testing controls.
If an amp hisses noticeably, we'll hear that. If it has a cooling fan that sounds like a turbine, we'll hear that. If it clips (softly or not) because it lacks the power to fill out the peaks at our listening level and with our speakers, we
may hear that. If it has .1% (or even 1%) harmonic distortion instead of .001%, we probably won't hear that, unless we have specific training and know exactly what to listen for and how to crank up the quiet bits to hear it. I struggle to hear harmonic distortion below about -35 dB (1% is -40 dB). It would depend on how much distortion in the other parts of the playback chain (including the speakers) add to it.
Crown makes amps for live-sound applications, where high power is the first requirement. Distortion isn't as important, because it's not used for playback, but rather for making primary sound that generally won't be recorded and played back. Low-level hiss and fan noise is not important at all in a live venue.
I have installed Crown amps in PA systems in churches, and the most recent one sounds excellent and makes no noise in the application. But the venue, notwithstanding that it is a church, has much higher tolerance for low-level hiss simply because the speakers are far from the listeners relative to my living room. It makes less noise than the cooling fan on the organ, and less hiss, too, even when we run it loudly enough to need cooling, which we don't usually do.
At home, I have excellent B&K amps that make a hiss I can (barely) hear in the room, and that was enough to push me to experiment with an NC502-based Buckeye amp (still in the queue). The Buckeye nominally puts out about the same power as the Crown in question (which is 300 wpc), though the Crown will do it at a higher duty cycle with a more continuous signal. Whether it produces enough hiss or fan noise to bother you is a whole other question.
Rick "annoyed by the cooling fan on the computers two rooms over in my listening space" Denney
