I'm sure if you could handle both watches together and, even if you didn't know the brands, you would be left in no doubt the Rolex is the better watch but, whether it is worth paying so much for a watch, is another matter. I don't do bling so, even if I could readily afford the Rolex, I wouldn't buy it.
You’ve sort of hit the nail on the head here. “Better” absolutely subjective.
Maybe there’s some parallels with he world’s best mechanical engineering - if a Rolex is 0.0001% more accurate at keeping time, does it actually make the watch any better at keeping time vs the cheaper version?
As
@bigboss said, it’s all perception. People feel better by wearing a Rolex, for potently multitudes of reasons. Even though you love it for the exclusivity & brand mystique, you’ll still tell your friends it’s objectively a better watch.
Going back to what
@davidf said in the original posts… some cables & components will lead to measurable differences. My point about human hearing is pertinent, I feel, as our hearing is limited meaning everything measurable might not be observable.
Hifi is in a bit of a particular pickle as we’ve all become entrenched in antipodal, binary views where the answer is more complex and allows many things to be true at the same time.
One that comes up over & over again is: measurable vs observable. It’s a completely straw man dichotomy as you need both to be true in order to create quality products, but it’s easier to pick a side & argue online.
- all dac chips might sound the same, but once it’s on.a different circuit board. It won’t take many capacitor or resistor values changs to make it measurable different, but what is the threshold when we start to hear the tonal difference?
In the world of guitar amps & pedals, there’s often only a couple of component changes are needed to impact noise floor or tone.
Clearly, only relying on measurements is a fools errand, especially for people like me who have no idea what sites like ASR actually test & why. Great scores are meaningless to me, yet they’re persuasive. Likewise, a recommendation can be massively valuable for me, but without some understanding of technical spec I’m just blindly following someone’s opinion.
This has got a bit sprawling & I’m not sure what point I’m actually trying to make. But I’ll end on this: acoustics & the mechanics of human hearing is a solved problem. It’s pure maths (as I learnt to my horrific detriment during a failed first year studying audio electronics at uni), and maths 100% rooted in evidence - or so I understand.
Been quite interesting reading different perspectives and it feels most people are open to a conversation rather than shut each other down.
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