@samureyex
Your post is littered with a number of dubious, assumptions, or claims.
I was very careful in what I wrote.
As I said measurements are useful and so far as they have been correlated to their Sonic consequences. Sometimes this can be complex to predict. Sometimes not too complex to predict. If you take two loudspeakers that have a generally neutral frequency response, except that one has a 5db rise between 3 to 7K, you can bet that unless you have hearing damage, you are going to hear that as added brightness, exaggerated sibilance for female singers, etc. There are all sorts of subjective consequences that can be well predicted from measurements. If that were the case then people who work in sounds like myself couldn’t even manipulate sound with any predictive results using EQ.
Further, I don’t know if you are aware of the amount of research on listener preferences for loudspeakers. See the work of Floyd Toole and others.
In controlling for sighted biases - double blind testing of loudspeakers - certain speaker measurements are highly predictive of what the vast majority of people will identify as “ sounding best.” Neutral on axis response, low or in audible resonances, and well-controlled, even, slowly sloping off axis response.
So yes, there are measurements that highly correlate with what most people will rate as good sound, when other non-biases are controlled for.
Once you open it back up to sighted listening, things are less predictable, but in test where only the audio factors are decisive, measurements are very predictive.
Likewise, measurements can tell you whether you’re going to hear a difference or not. Human hearing and audio have been studied for over 100 years, and we really do have a grasp on lots of things in terms of what are audible or not.
There are thresholds of distortion below, which you simply will not hear any difference between a piece of gear, such as amplifiers.
That’s why nobody has been able to show they can tell the difference apart in blind tests, between amplifiers that measure with distortion below the known audible threshold.
Now a problem, of course is going to be the divide between the “ golden ear subjectivist” and those who recognize the relevance of measurements and science.
If you believe that the most reliable method of evaluating gear is your own subjective impressions, without any sort of controls for bias, then we are going to remain at impasse. You can always claim, or believe, that you hear certain things. That’s how human bias and imagination works.
And this is where we arrive at the common claim from audiophiles “ but what about all that gear that measures amazing but sounds bad? That proves that could measurements don’t tell us the real story!”
Such claims, unless you or anybody else has actually verified those situations where you are “ not peeking” (you don’t know which gear you’re listening to and that’s been carefully controlled for) , then this is just in the real realm of your own anecdotes, and not something that you can simply claim as the truth from which to argue from.
So when you say that the Topping DAC doesn’t sound good… I don’t see why I should take that as a fact establishing the matter. If it’s the best measuring deck, Amir has come across, it is not going to be producing any spurious audible distortion that would make it sound bad. And you are unlikely to be able to tell it apart from another DAC that would have similar levels of low distortion.
But again, this is where we reach the impasse. If you believe that, nothing continue that your ears have got it wrong, and you are not open to being wrong about that, there’s not much I can say.
Of course there certainly does remain areas where differences and how things measure will amount to audible differences, in which we can have different preferences. I’m a fan of tube amps and I find the audible distortion with my amplifiers sounds “ good.” Somebody else may prefer a solid state amplifier.
And yes, ultimately, audible differences will come down to different preferences.
