If you want to make this a faith and religion discussion and talk about proof one point of view will win every honest argument. @prof is attempting to bring a balanced view and he still gets attacked. Don’t try to make it appear like you are the voice of reason when you are not.
@tcotruvo I don’t agree with @nyev but I don’t think your depiction of him is fair. Human experience creates strong convictions. I had to do a lot of unlearning "by fire" 20 some off years ago. I had a lot of preconceived ideas based on my "experience". What someone said to me that stuck is I didn’t have experience, I had experiences. They are not the same. Because we experience something does not mean we are gaining experience. Listening to lots of different systems does not give you experience unless you understand what is different about those system and how that translates into how they sound, and even accepting that some things will make minimal or no sound change.
Measurements cannot tell if something sounds warm, bright, musical, organic, analytical, transparent, soundstage width/height/depth ... just to name a few.
This was written above. Measurements can tell you most of these things. To understand those measurements and make some conclusions or know how to achieve them takes experience and understanding how things work. Experience also tells us that your interpretation of how something may sound at least for tone is influenced by what you are already listening to as you will adapt to your current system. If you have a "warm" system and listen to another warm system it will sound normal to you. To someone else it may sound overly warm.
