Stereophile complains it's readers are too informed.

We are kidding ourselves if we think this forum is mainly fact.  Facts are things that proven or else are universally acknowledge to be true by everyone apart from the mad.  Facts are hard to come by.  This forum is about 90% opinion and 10% fact.  Stereophile contains much the same mix, but their measurements are as factual as it gets.  Long may that last!

Four cheers for John Atkinson.  I have followed him since he started on Hi-Fi News & Record Review here in the UK in the early 1970s.  He improved HFNRR and stood out as an innovator with his feet firmly on the ground.  Stereophile is hugely better for his 30something years leadership.  Jim is finding him a hard act to follow.  Jim's editorial stance is quite a bit different from John's even though he says the mag won't change.

Those who question the benefit of measurements should note John's speaker measurements often confirm artifacts that the reviewer had heard (before he saw the measurements).  But sometimes an appararently glaring fault in a speaker is not noticed at all by the listening reviewer.  And that is not always because the reviewer might adore single-ended triode amps and horn speakers.

One thing which differentiates audio equipment magazine reviews from those reviewers of other cultural products— painting, music, film, dance, etc. — is that audio equipment is only partially an expressive artifact. It is necessarily instrumental to its purpose; in short, it is not trying to communicate something meaningful in the same vein as those other cultural products are.
Because of the above fact, magazines like Stereophile are forever beholden to the churn and hype of products-for-sale. They exist to help companies sell new stuff, and while they have developed standards based on subjective listening experience and engineering know how, they can never abandon their core mission: to celebrate or denigrate somehow, the “consumability” of the new thing for sale.

People say it all the time: namely, that the improvements made in various elements of an audio system are either imaginary or incremental. Given all the equipment which has been produced so far, if there was never any more “progress” and all we could lay our hands on was the existing range of options, surely there would be an adequate number of combinations to keep our quest for the absolute sound alive and well until the sun burns out.

The gist of my point is simply that there’s a major difference about the kind of “criticism” done by audio reviewers from those in other areas (who are *not* just trying to stuff a concert hall or a rodeo with easy marks) trying to interpret and convey the meaning of a new work of art. I make this point explicit here not because I think folks are unaware of it, but because I suspect this aspect is playing a role, somehow, in the ongoing discussion. 

John's speaker measurements often confirm artifacts that the reviewer had heard

No it doesn't. There is no connection between what the reviewer hears and their measurements. The ONLY way to assess a speaker is for me to hear them. Experience has taught me that the reviews are wrong and i am right. i hear artifacts that NO measurements can reveal and few other audiophiles hear. I am supreme. 

+1 Millercarbon

I gave up on that post and greatly appreciate your summary!

Buy what you like hearing. Measurements are measurements. Ratings are ratings. Neither of them are a convincing factor. The only convincing factor is what you hear...