Something the subjectivist crowd often brings up. "There are things we cannot measure but the human ear/eye/imagination/brain can hear it."
With the above additions, they're right. Here's light read that does a good job of synthesizing the insights of Kahneman et al. in a fun, engaging way:
You Are Not So Smart.
Illustration: a while back I wrote a review of the
ELAC compact integrated. It was a positive review, because the product looks great and has an innovate subwoofer integration/EQ software that I could confirm with measurements and listening does what it claims to do. Really the only thing it was missing was AirPlay support. Yet the first comment started like this:
"Great review with lots of information, but I fear that we may be missing the forest for the trees here...
I have compared this unit to similar offerings from other manufacturers and have found the Elac to be wanting in terms of imaging, detail and sheer musicality, even when paired with Elac's own well receive Uni-Fi speakers."
I never replied because I could not figure how to do so diplomatically.
One reason, aside from general delusion, is a funny/sad aspect to the comment: the commentator claimed an ICE-50 based compact integrated from Kanto "handily beats the Elac on the clarity/detail front at low to mid volumes" I owned that product. It had design flaw with the input stage that made it quite noisy. So much for "low to mid volume clarity/detail!" Kanto, to their credit, owned the problem, completely redesigned the product, and sent the new one to known owners of the broken model. (The new one had an integrated Class D chip amp, instead of the input board and ICE-50 amp.) Maybe I'm just a crazy point-headed measurement nerd, butI think a good general rule is a product with a low noise floor will have better "low to mid volume clarity/detail" than one with a broken input stage design that's super noisy.