Well, yes you can make anything B.S. by picking the worst offenders or strawmanning an entire concept.
I mean, that's what other "subjectivist" forums do with ASR right?
OK, I've thought about this, and I was wrong with one part of what I said.
The word "synergy" is not meaningless. Actually, the rest of my post showed that it is laden with meaning. And what's more, I suspect that not one of the writers I picked up those ideas from actually meant all of those things when I picked up each one of them.
Synergy in hifi is an "I'm an expert" word. You could say "I think these products work together well" and it captures the point. But it sounds much more expert to say "there's a synergy between them". You see? Now it's not an opinion but a fact. But because it's "expert speak" it puts the user of the word in a kind of more official or expert position just from saying it.
Here's a non-hi-fi example: the spread of the descriptors "male" and "female". So, previously, someone describing a crime on the TV news would say "I saw a man running down East Street after the gunshots". OK? But a police officer would now say, "A male was reported running north along East Street after the gunshots were heard". The use of the word "male" supposedly makes the report more official than saying man, for some reason. When I had to give a statement to police about something a few years ago, I had a long argument and insisted on changing where they wrote "female" in their taking down of my statement, to "woman" when it was read back to me. Apparently, "female" sounds better in court? Anyway, nowadays when you watch the news and someone gets a mic shoved in front of them, they now automatically say "male" or "female" though they would never do that in normal conversation.
Or, returning to hifi, let's take one of the most common descriptors, "warm". As far as I can tell, warm was first used as an informal term applied to radios and early electric gramophones, the opposite of "bright". It seems to just mean that low frequencies were present in the sound: later, it meant that low frequencies were emphasised. However, it had and has an emotionally positive feel to it (my feet are cold while I'm writing this, so of course it feels that way to me right now!).
So, reviewers used the term. But it didn't feel right to use imprecise language, so of course, people tried to give it a meaning, and you can find those lexicons and articles online now. So one definition of the term was that frequencies around 250Hz are emphasised. See what just happened? A warm sound isn't a positive thing any more. Now it's becoming a specific distortion. Now, for people like most of us at ASR, warm=distorted=bad when used that way. Warm also in that process gets a little of the "I'm an expert" meaning because it is now a technical term.
Yet newcomers to the field, as well as some of the subjective reviewers, don't see it that way. Warm is still a positive attribute. How do we know what is meant? It still carries the "I'm an expert" thing though.
We've had people arrive here claiming that the most treble-heavy speakers (B&W's recent output of course) have a lovely, warm sound, not like those cold steely KEF speakers. Confused? It appears that because the writer likes the sound, and warm is a positive description in the press - thus an "expert word" though divorced again from its specific meaning - the system they have must be warm!
This leads to posers, not clarity. About a decade ago now, I had an earnest young salesperson (male, see - I'm doing it myself here!) tell me that the disc player he wanted me to buy was first "warm", then "smooth". So was I right to reply that a component can't be both warm and smooth, or not?
The thing is, we have to make the words work. Some words aren't going to work, and some words carry too much or the wrong meaning now. I don't intend to strawman the idea that some components work together better than others, though I expect that to be explicable through measurement...
