Amir and Blind Testing

At least presumably the function of good audio components is to reproduce as accurately as possible any given sound, especially music. So measurements are a way of estimating the efficacy of the equipment. The performance of any given unit must relate to these measurements for it to be considered accurate. 
Now if you don’t like that accurate sound and find it disagreeable does that mean that measurements are bad? Of course not. Tube equipment has a very distinctive sound due to distortion. If you like that sound, which plenty of people do, well and fine. The fact that most people like various degrees of distortion doesn’t invalidate Amir and his measurements. Personally I like the components recommended by Amir, Purifi amp and RME DAC, so in my case the measurements were good criteria to follow. Additionally, Amir has effectively debunked the market for extravagantly expensive cables whose manufacturers falsely claim bear measurable improvements yet they are identical to a $5 Amazon cable. But, if one has spent thousands on cables one may well be hostile to Amir and measurements, and insist that one hears auditory phantasms. 

As a side note to my own thread, many people knee-jerk into thinking that Amir thinks high-priced components are BS and cheap Toppings are the shizzle. Not so. He raved about the $4000+ Dan Clark headphones and he uses a $20k Levinson amp with $20k Revel speakers in his own system. He also raves about the $10k Genelec monitors. 

Tube equipment has a very distinctive sound due to distortion.

Tubes devices are also more linear than solid state devices without the use of feedback, Which also could have something to do with the way they sound.

@chayro  Just to return to your original question in this thread, as long as you switch between components when evaluating gear and your mental state (analytical, relaxed, mellow, angry, happy, silly, or whatever) doesn't change dramatically as you switch gear, you should be able decide which gear sounds best to you.

@rtorchia  Your comments about "accurate" sound compared to "distinctive" sound in terms of distortion are not consistent with what I have learned over the course of 50 years of listening to hifi gear. I've lived through the Stereo Review mindset of the 1970s and 1980s, when designers sought ever-lower levels of THD (usually by increasing feedback in the circuits), despite the fact that many of these products sounded harsh and electronic. Many of the comments on the ASR site seem to embrace a view quite similar to that now debunked view from Stereo Review. 

If you want to learn how to design gear that measures and sounds great, pay attention to the approach of a great audio designer like Nelson Pass. I recently watched a YouTube interview by Steve Guttenberg, during which Nelson discusses the importance of listening to distortion profiles rather than just measuring THD levels when designing great amps. Some people like to claim that amps from Pass Labs add distortion (mainly 2nd and 3rd harmonics) to improve the sound, but Nelson says that they simply don't try to suppress the 2nd and 3rd harmonics as much as they suppress higher order distortions. So which design approach is more "accurate" and which is more unnatural, one that reduces the influence of higher order distortions or one that simply reduces THD? I would argue that whatever sounds more natural and more like real music is the best choice. And Nelson Pass stresses that they use an ongoing approach of measure-listen-measure-listen to design their amps. Any approach that prioritizes measuring over listening clearly does not have its priorities straight.

We had tons of equipment back in the 70s with the lowest measurable distortion possible. One of the founding principles of high end audio was to prioritize sound over specs.