I think ASR is great and wish nothing more for its focus to remain where it is. For absence of doubt, whatever my criticisms of people's interpretations of the measurements may be, there is no substitute to be had at all in the traditional subjective evaluation process. And of course this is just my perspective.
We have extensively, and repeatedly shown that such attention cost nothing.
Where have you shown this? Or are you just saying that there are low-cost products that manage to be optimized? I agree that such products exist; I don't know whether that means it cost nothing or whether the additional costs were amortized.
It's hard for me to separate the reality from the marketing but it seems like Jason and Mike do the lions share of the engineering over there and they make a *lot* of things. So there's the value of their time. True that this is not exactly cutting edge stuff so it's not like you have to spend millions on R&D, but at the same time the engineering is only "free" if they can amortize it over thousands of units. Or maybe it's free in the sense that a better engineer would have gotten it right the first time? Maybe that's the case, but it's not free to hire another engineer who can do it right the first time.
I also don't know the extent to which the incredible measurements of some products are a tradeoff for less stability leading to reliability problems. Not being an engineer I really have no idea; what's your take? Is safety/reliability completely orthogonal to incredible measurements, even from the perspective of how much time/money you spend on a limited budget? Topping is a great example of a company that consistently provides jaw-dropping measurements, but has released one product after another with high failure rates (e.g., PA5 I, L30 I, LA90, A70). Is this coincidental or reflective of the tradeoffs inherent to prioritizing measurements?
As to your broader point, put your ear next to the tweeter of your speaker, with music on pause, and volume turned up. If you hear noise, then channel transparency has not been achieved.
That's just not something I would do. Arguably it's not even safe. There's no reason to do that except maybe to win arguments on the Internet or just have a feeling in your heart that you have the perfect electronics. But now we're just arguing over words, and I already said that the word transparent is contextual and slippery. So wherever I used the word "transparent," just substitute "transparent for the purposes of listening to music in the manner that the overwhelming majority of people listen to music." Is that a compromise? Sure, but everything's a compromise. There's no such thing as perfect information transfer in the analog world; but we can get it so good that we can't tell the difference. And we don't need to construct artificial roadblocks in our way. What value is there in an amp that is hiss free at high volume with your ear pressed against the tweeter? There's might even be *anti* value to that, as having that kind of near-perfection may encourage you to do something dangerous like that.
