Why are we even here at all?
Personally I’m here to see if I’m getting ripped off. A lot of these companies have got away with ton of bs over the years.
As stated in my previous comment it’s really hard to for us as a consumer to really know what sounds good.
From another perspective to judge a reviewer or really know what their intentions are. They maybe deceiving you or as I said if it measures decent it will sound “good”
I mean take a look around, look at all the audio companies that exist and clearly all of them can’t be the best. Yet, they don’t go out of business. People do purchase and enjoy what they have even when it’s poopoo.
I understand the philosophy of these companies. From Hegel to Rega and you name it. You buy the cheap or mid first, you love how it sounds and they hope you move up the line as that clearly means better sound. If not that in the future buy the name with possibly a new line of amplifiers or dacs or who knows what piece of equipment.
Common sense says though you can’t get me to spend thousands on a product when something at a fraction of the cost is doing better and there’s evidence to back that.
A little more detail about journey and feel free to skip it, I got my point across. I’m extremely new to home audio. I started in September 2020. I was in real search for a good amp and found so many that cost so much Hegel, Rega, Cambridge and I was very close to pulling the trigger on cause there marketing got me.
I was finally settled on musical fidelity, but I couldn’t really trust them either. So I decided to try vintage and bought a couple amps and found exactly what I was looking for in parasound.
So far thanks to Amir we fished out Cambridge as somewhat of a rip and Hegel a super rip. Rega too, at least it gets good at a price tag of 4,000. The rest of these companies maybe dishing out mediocre for insane price tags
Honestly I can go on and on, but even on the top spectrum I got a chance to listen to the benchmark amp and it didn’t impress me either.
Yet at home in my main system, everything besides the amp is 120 db SNR my sources jitter is 142. To my ears everything sounds amazing.
Does the junk amp sound amazing? No it doesn’t.
Does it sound god awful? No it doesn’t.
I don’t think there’s any way to quantify the difference with an absolute answer.