Point to Point vs Circuit Board

It's the size of the pins my friend.

You don't need giant traces for low current signals. More important is how you route them and the capacitance/inductance caused.  Even with these tiny signal paths most designers will use far bigger traces for power and ground traces or even use the entire board as a power or ground.

There's also arguments to be made for the superior behavior of surface mounted devices vs. pinned IC's in terms of capacitance and inductance at the connectors themselves, making them impossible to be point to point.

I know a builder that does something pretty unique.  He primarily builds amps, preamps and linestages, but, he also builds DACs.  All of his builds employ point-to-point wiring (he builds tube gear), but for the DAC, a circuit board is used for the digital/conversion part of the unit.  But, the circuit board is not actually printed, even if it looks to be a printed board on casual inspection.  The board is a sheet of bakelite with a sheet of copper bonded to the bakelite.  The circuit traces are made by CNC machining out of the copper sheet to leave the traces.  

There are benefits to p2p wiring AND circuit boards. The original Phase Linear amps were p2p. In fact, when the 300 series 2 amps were built, many of them had additional wires added to certain points because the pcb traces were too thin (high resistance) to carry the necessary current and that caused failures. Their low cost solution, add some 18awg wire. Circuit boards can be designed to carry the necessary current using thicker copper clad and doubling the traces on multilayer pcb's. Nowadays the best manufactures take everything into consideration to maintain low capacitance, inductance and resistance. That's how the best remain the best.

Manufacturers today take everything into consideration - like who?

Have you opened up one and modified any?

Most components are built to a price point.  There are very few doing P2P wiring because of the cost.  I make a hybrid power amp that is P2P with bi-polar transistors.

So far I have not heard a product that uses a circuit that out performs P2P but hey I am always listening.

Happy Listening.

This is rubbish point to point (and dangerous), (circuit boards would be better)
(very expensive unit and highly regarded by some🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ )
No two would sound the same, and you all know it. https://ibb.co/yPhb5PK

This is proper point to point (better than circuit boards)
https://ibb.co/nwff5zJ
https://ibb.co/fSVdnT2

Cheers George