Lot of angles here. First principles: "good" audio reproduction is a lot more objective than most think. It turns out that what "sounds good" is... accurate si

Lot of angles here. First principles: "good" audio reproduction is a lot more objective than most think. It turns out that what "sounds good" is... accurate signal reproduction, usually fitted to a target response curve (sometimes known as the Harman curve) that more or less corresponds to the Fletcher-Munson equal loudness curve. You also need enough dynamic headroom to reproduce the peaks in the listening material - this gets challenging when talking about material with large dynamic range like well-recorded classical, movie soundtracks, etc. The reality is that Bose is wildly boosted in certain frequencies to be louder, not better. This is true for some Bose products, not others. Their noise canceling headphones hew pretty closely to industry standard response curves, ie: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/bose-quietcomfort-45-headphone-review.46500/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b... [McIntosh] They're (as far as I know) an _actual_ premium brand, meant to represent the music faithfully. Speakers, even high-end speakers, tend to be distortion machines that do anything but represent music faithfully. They typically sound ear pleasing, and some brands (B&W, IMO) actually crank up the treble in order to sound more "detailed" and compensate for the diminished high frequency hearing of their target audience (aging male boomers with extra cash to blow) Exceptions are high end speakers (Genelec) designed for studio use, but you can also get pretty close to that level of performance from cheap JBL 3-series active monitors. (Depends on whether you need that last 1% or not) As far as amplifiers, McIntosh's most famous products, reproducing music "faithfully?" Well, even cheap < $100 chip amps on eBay do that well, objectively speaking. What premium amps like McIntosh tend to have is oodles of sustained power and big beefy capacitors for even greater burst power for clean dynamic peaks even at high SPLs. You don't need to spend McIntosh-style megabucks to get that, but it's kinda like table stakes for a "premium" amp.