> Much of this is cultural driven by a historical time when we didn't have the tools to measure this stuff, and reproduction was so bad that nearly anything th

> Much of this is cultural driven by a historical time when we didn't have the tools to measure this stuff, and reproduction was so bad that nearly anything that changed the sound in any way could be argued to be an improvement. [citation needed] State of the art distortion measuring techniques resolved something like 0.002 % in the 70s.