Yeah it's a real golden era for the hobby, if you ask me. By my reckoning one can have an objectively excellent system for a small/medium residential room for w

Yeah it's a real golden era for the hobby, if you ask me. By my reckoning one can have an objectively excellent system for a small/medium residential room for well under $700. The primary difference between that a more capable system would be the horsepower required to achieve the desired SPL levels in larger spaces and/or reproduce recorded material with a large dynamic range. Even casual consumer gear is getting better these days. A lot of these little home speakers (HomePod mini, etc) put out some pretty reasonable sound: tonally correct, low distortion, etc. The objectivist approach is trickling up as well as down. but real progress is being made towards non-trivial questions like how one should measure the performance of headphones and speakers, what the ideal actually is, and what deviations from that ideal make the most difference. Amen. If anything, the objectivist community might actually veer too far into objectivity at this point, lol. Lots of nitpicking over small differences that show up in measurements but are certainly inaudible. I think the next frontier is a stronger correlation between measurements and listener preference/audibility. We know that better-measuring gear sounds better. But the correlation between better measurements and listener preference is far from linear.