For the sake of argument, let's accept that people here are commonly ranking by SINAD.
How is that worse than Resolve equating SINAD with snake oil?
I mean...objectively, the ranking used here is typically SINAD. It's kind of weird to me that this is in contention at all, because a hierarchically ranked list sorted by SINAD is present in every review of DACs, amplifiers, etc.
It's worse in the scenario where it encourages someone to overspend on a product, IMO - precisely as with any other technically-true aspect of audio which doesn't relate to sound quality. I'm equally ornery with somebody saying "don't buy a MiniDSP 2x4HD, it has poor IMD (which is almost assuredly below the threshold of audibility with music)" and someone saying "don't buy a Topping L30, it doesn't use gold-based solder and sounds worse as a result". In that respect, I see commonality between an obsession with a measureable-but-not-audibility-correlated metric and every other form of snake oil in the industry. That isn't so that that this is the default pattern on ASR, or of Amir - but objectively I do observe people being told that they should buy new equipment or pay more than they would otherwise in order to get something better-scoring (more often than not on sites other than ASR, but with reference to the rankings here), and that is indeed quite annoying to me.
For context:
There may be a disqualifying aspect to SINAD if the results are quite bad, but even then… you may want to disqualify products that score much better if you have more sensitive IEMs for example. And at worst, SINAD is effectively a different kind of snake oil, where it causes people to make purchase decisions thinking they’re getting better performance when in fact they aren’t.
Why just not explain what SINAD is and what it isn't and not confuse the issue? Why spin a technical measurement?
I would pretty happily endorse this sentiment - amplifiers and DACs are and have long been a solved problem. With the exception of a small pool of wrong-on-purpose designers and a few hobbyists-cum-manufacturers with no technical knowledge whatsoever, it is extremely difficult to find a DAC or amplifier which will audibly impact your experience of sound. The cases where this does happen are almost universally due to audible noise, with amplifiers which have audible frequency response variation¹ or distortion outside of clipping being a
drastic minority.
You aren't going to get a better experience of sound by buying a JDS Atom if you have an O2, or frankly, most likely even if you have an original Magni, which measured meaningfully worse. In that respect, I don't want people to get the misimpression that something that "measures better" is going to impact the sound inherently, any more than I'd want them to think that a better metallurgy in their cable will impact the sound. So that is to say, the "spin" here is - at least insofar as I'm putting spin on things - part of my general annoyance with focusing people's attention on the parts of audio that functionally don't matter (DACs, amplifiers, and indeed "source gear" as a whole) over the areas that do matter (headphones, speakers, and digital signal processing). Cameron, of course, believes in that sort of thing, so I'm sure his motivations differ, but he's been long banned from this forum, so he can't speak to his POV here - you are welcome to inquire on our forum, of course.
1: Excepting the effect of Zout, although the number of amplifiers I've seen with high output impedance which were not in the "built wrong on purpose" category is vanishingly small and mostly long out of production
And lastly why is a rare most sensitive IEM the go-to example?
This is mostly as a general "gotcha", although sadly stupidly-sensitive IEMs are not
that uncommon - in spite of the complete irrationality of their design, Campfire sold a
lot of Andromedas, and the Andromeda is something on the order of 143dBSPL/V, meaning that it would produce audible noise connected to the APX555's signal generator through a noiseless buffer. A number of the "more drivers more better" Chinese IEM companies are also following this same trend (presumably in a similar way, by paralleling high sensitivity, low-Z drivers), so one legitimately can end up with an IEM which can hear what should otherwise be a uselessly low noise floor.
To be clear, this is entirely a failure on the part of IEM designers - there is no need whatsoever to have consumer IEMs that produce audible noise from devices that have 120dB SNR referenced to 2V, but sadly it does still happen, and it serves as an ironic reminder of the futility of trying to perfect the audio experience in source gear when the incompetence of the transducer designers will always be the big issue.