What bothers me about these threads is that are started and kept alive by people who think they know what is best for everyone else and, according to them, everyone else is not doing what is best.
That wasn't what I was trying to say: I wasn't making normative statements about what people should buy. I was making a normative claim that manufacturers/sellers should be at least somewhat honest, and that hobbyists should be a bit more realistic and honest with themselves. If they want to buy stuff because it looks cool or gives them bragging rights, they should admit that. But pretending some of these products make music sound better is, for the most part, just that, pretending.
As has been pointed out, the whole hobby has the problem of a shrinking base of hobbyists. Part of the problem, at least in my circle, is that most people just start to laugh when they hear about the super-expensive cables, etc, and walk away. And very few scientists or engineers can tolerate listening to technobabble from some salesperson while being condescended to.
As far as the great minds go: again, this is a list of people with a financial interest in this stuff.
And there are plenty of threads where people (mostly but certainly not absolutely always) with little or no technical understanding of engineering, physics, electronics, or acoustics rant on about what a bunch of idiots the skeptical engineering types are. Why shouldn't the engineering types return the favor?
Nobody is claiming here that we can measure absolutley everything. But without at least blind tests, in the absence of measurements, this stuff has the status of phrenology.
As I've said before, a poorly done blind test doesn't invalidate the concept. The entire pharma industry runs on them, and I, for one, would rather rely on them (for all their faults) than on some guy in his garage who can't explain why his new drug works, or show that it even does statistically. I don't see how audio is trly different from this.
