When I got back into red wine a few years ago ( a real passion since college) I read several books on sommelier and what it takes… etc. Then I bought an

https://aromaster.com/product/master-wine-aroma-kit/

Kit. With 88 auroras. From lemon grass, to horse sweat (yes, it comes up). To train my nose. It is amazing how you can go from oblivious to relatively sensitive… in. Months or years of training.

@thyname 

I make my purchasing decisions the same way as everyone else, not only by listening/tasting but by recommendation, research, review etc.

But to repeat - all I'm saying is we're all kidding ourselves if we think listening/tasting are entirely objective.

Connoisseurship is a lot like marriage. There is no objectivity in choosing a partner or what to be partnered with, and our criteria is always changing anyway. None of us wakes up every morning and repeats the same pledge of allegiance, or if we do we are just fooling ourselves. We are willing to risk being fooled because that's how life stacks up. Many times we get fooled, but it turns out to be fortuitous after all.

Well, one big difference between wine and audio is that the chemical composition provably differs from one wine or vintage to the next, whereas the composition of an audio signal, pre-speaker, is electrical and it does not vary based on the multitude of variables that can affect wine.  Some things can (an amplifier) and some things cannot, and so where you get into these big arguments is when someone argues that something changed the electrical signal when from an engineering/physics standpoint it cannot. So a somm. will carry more credibility than a guy playing with the direction of fuses. 

As others have mentioned, the wine industry isn't without it's conspiracy theories.  I'm fairly certain that professional "tasters" and "smellers" can be tested to on some level (i.e. at what concentration can they identify a known taste or smell) but I don't know if this is done.  I'm not into it at all, but I think the wine industry is based primarily on subjective evaluations of the taste along with how exclusive the product is.

The audiophile world is certainly similar in a lot of ways.  I think the controversies come from a couple of different directions.  One is that because audiophile equipment is, in theory, and engineered product there's an expectation that measurements on meaningful.  Another is that the placebo effect is absolutely (in my mind) in play for a lot of audiophile while there are a few with truly golden ears that detect differences that most simply cannot.  Another is that most audiophiles are influenced by expectation bias when it comes to hearing what are only differences.

Probably the biggest aspect, in my mind, is that so much of the industry relies on pseudoscience that many that have some understanding of the related physical and engineering simply lose all confidence.  I think that a lot of companies "design" by trial and error using their ears and then try to explain the differences scientifically.

I try to keep an open mind that there are systems and ears that transcend mine and my experience is very limited.  I have heard differences that I did not expect and in some cases don't understand how someone else might not hear the difference.

What really bugs me is when people compare two products that have little beyond the product type in common and then attribute the differences that they hear to a cherry picked attribute and then that experience becomes evidence for another audiophile.