Your summary statement is excellent and as good as necessary I think.
Taking chadnliz's comment to a further extreme - you might just tell "Dad" that all the nerve endings that would have been in one part of your anatomy ended up in your brain attached to your ears instead. Although the words "" and "father in law" used in the same context, let alone the same sentence, is a recipe for trouble?!?
Only slightly more seriously, I like the analogy of reproducing a digital image on a computer or TV screen. The end result is a combination of how well the image was captured initially, and the ability of the hard drive, video card, and screen resolution and color capability to faithfully reproduce that image. Most people can easily tell the difference between a VGA image in 16 colors and a HD signal in millions of colors. Your "boxes" do a better or less good job of reproducing the "sound pixels", and you can hear this difference and it affects your enjoyment. Some boxes may have less resolution and the sound's "color" may be off a bit from the original digital image, but you or another person may like this better than a more completely accurate reproduction of the original (but not perfect) digital image because this version more closely represents how you experience live images in real time with your own ears (or eyes, why some people like tube boxes over solid state boxes or paintings over photographs, for example).
