The Audio Science Review (ASR) approach to reviewing wines.

Why are so many "audiophiles" so obsessed with that site? Measurements make a difference but shouldn't be the only thing one uses to determine what to buy. 

I'd rather go by measurements than all the subjectivity that many (most) so-called audiophiles use to determine what sounds good and what doesn't. 

Both subject and objective are important.  Too many extreme opinions in both this forum and ASR.  Cults are bad.

Some interesting ASR reviews and tid-bits but that's where it ends. 

I really don't like the condecending attitude. A rather grumpy group of 'know it alls' looking to show their superiority to the crowd. Your 'opinion' is NOT welcome and they will tell you exactly that in rather nasty fashion.

I'm not an ASR disciple, I've invested in some cables and don't believe measurements tell the whole story, but measurements at a minimum seem to add useful context. I don't buy into Amir's philosophy by any means, but his posts here have been civil, at least the ones I've read. Certainly more civil than many of the responses he gets. Amir, Gene and the other "objectivists" add useful information, but not the last word as their more pedantic followers assert.  

The ones I don't respect are the reviewers who say that measurements don't matter and blind tests are invalid. One suspects that the most important characteristic of a product for them is that they received a free copy to review.

Lastly, I don't know about the wine analogy-I'm in the middle of bourbon country and that process is filled with chemistry and measurements. The difference is that if you have a set of cheap, poorly made speakers, the third song you hear through them will sound as bad as the first. On the other hand, as you get past the third glass of Kentucky Gentleman, it will taste more and more like Pappy. Burn in, I suppose.

I no longer have the listening acuity that I once had, so my days of having firm opinions about one thing sounding “better” than another are behind me…like a wine snob with COVID whose sense of smell has gone away.  But as a person retired from a 50+ year HiFi career, I have opinions, some based on what I used to be sure I heard. I know that some audio designers believe as Amir does that audio component accuracy can be reduced to transfer function and SINAD.  What else is there, after all (they wonder)?  But I used to hear “depth” and “spaciousness” in some things, and not others, where both easily met criteria for flat, extended bandwidth and THD and noise.  I even had a preamp that sounded positively marvelous…unless you engaged the rumble filter, which collapsed the soundstage.  The engineer who created that preamp may not have noticed, or even listened to it to find out. If .1%THD in an amp or preamp is “inaudible”, why is .0001 better?  The ASR “less is better” approach doesn’t impress me.  He does base his recommendations on an array of measures and does recommend many items that aren’t “the best”, but there is a Calvinistic aversion to luxury build quality and pricing (if not matched with top class measurements) that is appealing to the less affluent, perhaps younger, reader.  I used to belong to the Boston Audio Society, and these debates between objectivists and subjectivists were just as entertaining then.