Just like AES members, you mean. They stuck their heads in the sand for years and insisted that digital was perfect. Until they found that it wasn't. Till today there are some flat earthers who cling to dogma and insist that bits is bits.
I will point out that many so-called objectivists seem to be stuck in the 1980's and have ignored most of the findings of pscyhoacoustics. I read recently that one reason why people think vinyl sounds better might be because it has more crosstalk than digital. Sure enough, if you install a VST plugin and increase the crosstalk you will find the music to take on a more relaxing sound. How do you think people found that out? By dissecting cochleas and measuring speakers?
Well, you'd be wrong on some very basic things, then. No, nobody's learned about why interaural crosstalk is useful by dissecting cochleas, which are a monophonic organ to begin with. On the other hand, measuring speaker/room/head/ear canal resonances, using purely digital equipment, it's trivial to show why the right kind of crosstalk, especially in headphones, is important to a natural listening experience. This is backed up by mathematical examination of the interaction of wavefronts with one's head.
As to your comments about digital, a proper digital recording in a standard listening room does exceed the well-established sensitivities of the human auditory system, a statement that can be very clearly understood by relating to the physics of the situation. I'll leave that for another article if you would like to engage in a reasonable fashion.
Oh, and distortion as a function of level is also very important to why some people prefer vinyl. You can find a brief discussion of this on an ancient blog at audioskeptic.blogspot.com if you like, or by going to
www.aes.org/sections/pnw, looking in the "powerpoint" section or the "meeting recaps" section for discussions of loudness vs. intensity vs. signal bandwidth.
Then there is the work done by Earle Geddes. This has been extensively debated in audio forums. But in case you missed it, the traditional way of quantifying THD is meaningless, because even large amounts of lower order harmonic distortion is less damaging than even small amplitude high order harmonic distortion. You don't learn this from dissecting cochleas either. You get this from asking people what their preferences are.
Again, that knowledge comes precisely from understanding the known characteristics of the human cochlea. You don't have to ask people, it is blatantly, trivially obvious from first principles, using well-established psychoacoustic science from the time of Harvey Fletcher, that high-order distortion is going to be much more audible, and most likely much more disturbing, than low-order effect, until you get to IM issues on sparse signal spectra.
This is well known and obvious from the mathematics of cochlear function.
If this is "Audio SCIENCE Review" it seems as if a disturbingly large number of members here aren't scientific at all. Instead, anything that conflicts with their preconcieved notions is dismissed out of hand. I have met quite a few engineering types who cling on to their precious and perfect world of measurements and computer simulations and forget that we live in the real world - where people from other scientific disciplines may be asking questions you never considered, and use different methods to what you are used to.
Engineering is all about the real world, real acoustics, the real performance of human beings in the system, and lots of other things. While I have certainly met a number of people who reject the testable, falsifiable principles behind psychoacoustics and cochlear modelling in favor of "signal to noise ratio", the leaders in the audio industry, who are by and large always using proper digital methods and equipment, are well aware of the signal processing that happens on the human cochlea, and to a surprising extent how the brain uses the information coming down the auditory nerve.
And, none of this is new. I refer you to a must-have book "The ASA Edition of Speech and Hearing in Communication" by Harvey Fletcher, edited by Jont B. Allen. It covers work primarily in the 1930's that explains, for instance, your comment about distortion order, comes about. It also, with some modern mathematics, explain why that center speaker in the book is so important to, for instance, depth perception. I will warn you, it is a tough, tough read with huge quantities of information on most every page.
Oh, and your comment about 'dissecting cochleas'. That's ridiculous, the cochlea is an ***ACTIVE*** organ. You won't figure out much of that from something that's dead. Among other things, the Organ of Corti is likely to collapse the second you start your attempt. Then you have nothing much to learn.