Buying Equipment Based on Philosophy???

Well, this certainly is intentional. Vendors all want you to feel a certain connection to the brand.  I mean, that's the entire purpose of branding.  To sell you an idea on a name or symbol which you want to associate yourself with due to ..... whatever.

This is missing the point. I'm not buying from a person or company because they are nice people....This ain't about lollypops and roses.....I'm buying because their design "philosophy" has merit on an engineering level. 

I agree to a small extent, but when all is said and done, it’s my ears and bank account that determine what I buy. 

The technical design philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with my purchase decisions. Great way to make poor choices. To me, except in the lowest level equipment. Now, the design philosophy of Audio Research and Conrad Johnson is not technically oriented, but of the sound quality characteristics they want to achieve. But if that philosophy took them somewhere other than where I wanted to go it also would be of no value… I wouldn’t give a hoot about what they said.

Choosing based on specific designs or philosophy is a great way to get a ok sounding system, at best.

Yep. Philosophy of demonstrated excellent high voltage, low capacitance topology, point to point wiring, pi (choke) filtered power supply, handmade equipment built with the finest components; in other words, the finest possible.

I would hope that everyone would be influenced by design approach of the company in combination with their approach for marketing.

Some companies simply don’t present their products in a way that makes a compelling case to consider their products absent any other information.

I’m a member of several other audiophile groups and I’ve run across several people that are spending thousands of dollars on equipment without having even a rudimentary working knowledge of the product.  What pains me the most is when they try to assess why it does something or sounds a certain way because it breeds recommendations that are completely off base.  Things like evaluating the potential benefit of moving to a balanced connection by using an RCA to XLR adapter. 
 

I probably should have stopped before the rant escaped…