Steve, personal enjoyment is one thing, accuracy is another and that is the only thing that matters on this forum. Its all about hi fidelity, not my fidelity.
Surely the whole point is personal musical enjoyment, that's why we do it.
Two things can be true at the same time. On this form, our expectation is that there is a
strong correlation between accuracy and personal musical enjoyment.
Before I joined ASR, believed there was
probably a correlation, but I was also certain there is a lot more to enjoyment than objective performance. Then I dipped a toe into this world by purchasing a few high-SINAD products with Amir's stamp of approval. The first few included the original Khadas Toneboard DAC, S.M.S.L. Sanskrit 10th v2 DAC, and some stuff from Orchard Audio. It did not take long for me to discover that this gear sounded really good…better than more expensive components that I already owned. They were not just better; I actually enjoyed the listening experience more with them in the system.
I'm still not 100% convinced that SINAD and the other metrics tell the whole story. For example, when building a signal path from multiple components, the end-to-end result is the sum of noise and distortion contributed by each. If all components add 3rd order harmonic distortion, the net result will be worse than if distortion products are at the same level but distributed. What about impedance matching among components? The measurements here are focused on steady-state performance, but I'm curious about how we perceive sound from devices with different time-domain performance.
All of that said, I now own a dozen or so high-SINAD products. The composition of my systems has completely changed, and I've never enjoyed listening to music more. I'm hearing deeper in to the mix of tracks in my library than ever before and having a blast. I suppose it's possible that there are people out there who have become accustomed to high noise and distortion and miss it when it's gone. It could be the nostalgia factor. But I have to imagine that if they spent more time listening to their music without this gunk, many of them would become accustomed to higher fidelity and never want to go back. That's certainly been the case with me.