The premise of "perfect sound" is almost antithetical to the current state of the audiophile world. Some of the most expensive, well reviewed "audiophile" syste

The premise of "perfect sound" is almost antithetical to the current state of the audiophile world. Some of the most expensive, well reviewed "audiophile" systems have worse specs than your run of the mill, mid-fi system. Heck, look at the obsession with vinyl, no matter which way you look at it, no matter how much superstition you have, the simple fact is that it has poorer fidelity than a CD. That "magic" quality that makes vinyl sound better than digital? Distortion. Albeit a quite pleasing distortion, but a distortion non the less. Plain and simple. The world of audiophile gear is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. The human ear, just like the human eye, is.. well, rather poor. We have a very small spectrum in which we operate. So these magazines like stereophile will plop an osciliscope onto the latest piece of gear and marvel over the fact that it's flat from 0 to a kazillion and then talk about its "creamy, refined mids." Someone please kill me. Audiophile USB cables, audiophile mode-correcting rocks, audiophile amps with .00000000000001% THD, that damn marker to color your CDs with? All hooey. I once read in a forum an anecdote about a guy switching from Monster, to some other overpriced cable and being able to tell the difference from a room away. This was not a tongue in cheek post. The big problem is that this stuff is eerily close to religion. A bulk of the hard-core, $7000 CD player audiophiles I know are actually rather well educated -- engineers of one type or another, but they slip into cognitive dissonance when it comes to anything relating to audio. A phrase uttered far too frequently is "You can't measure what I'm hearing." Once that mindset is adopted, confirmation bias is king. Here's a $4k pear audio cable. It'll increase the air in the high end by around 15%. http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/audio-designline-blog/4033511/Audio-Myths-Workshop-video http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/audio-designline-bl...