Yes, it's an endless debate, but apparently adc doesn't realize that. Acd - you are not the first to wade in to the audio world claiming specs and science have 'solved' the audio reproduction problem. People were probably doing that back in the 60's. Whether you intend it this way or not, the basic upshot of your position is this:
"I know everything there is to know about the human auditory system"
Sounds like a statement that might be overreaching *just* a bit. Now, I consider myself largely on the 'objective' side of the O/S debate, and the majority of my decisions are technically guided. I probably believe that about 95+% of the anecdotal reports of 'this is better' are purely psychological in nature and thus don't pay any attention to them. BUT, it still doesn't take much digging to realize that there is far more at play in how we hear and percieve music than we currently understand. It also doesn't take much digging to realize that the entire idea of formal testing auditory phenemonena is fraught with practical difficulties, however simple it may look on paper.
So, given that so many folks have seen this type of thing go by before, when you wade in with overly simple absolute statements on audibility it says to most people that you haven't really done your homework.
Ultimately, there are limits to what we can prove about audibility. Those limits currently leave open a lot of questions, and whenever that happens you end up dealing with a situation based on faith or belief, neither of which are provable pretty much by definition (though they obviously are arguable in the sense that we still argue about them). So, it's pointless. The best thing that (hopefully) can come out of this is that by approaching certain aspects with both skepticism and an open mind, we can theorize about some characteristics that ARE isolatable to the point of being able to start testing for them; this will undoubtedly be a slow process.
To address one specific example:
You guys aren't actually reading what I've written. An engineer/designer can alter the circuit topography of his amp to make it sound like a tube amp. If he can do that, it means there's no magic to tube design. It also means that the data can describe sound.
Sounds great, except that it's wrong in that it presupposes it's own conclusion. Tube amps differ from solid state amps in MANY ways, not just the shape of the transfer function. They have different output impedance characteristics. They have different distortion levels AS WELL AS spectral distribution. They have different saturation/overload characteristics. The output xformer introduces different bandwidth constraints. They'll almost certainly have different EMI/RFI signatures and sensitivities. Furthermore, all of this may change with frequency and/or absolute reproduction level.
So, exactly which of those is responsible for 'tube sound'? We don't know, and it's impossible for an SS amp to simultaneously match a tube amp in all of these aspects. Certainly things like the Zen amps seem to have similar characteristics to simple tube topologies, but even then there are differences.
So, no - there is no 'magic'. There isn't any 'ether' through which the 'soul' of the music travels independent of the electrical circuits. But the truth is that it's a heck of a lot harder to identify which characteristics of that signal correspond to 'music' than it first appears, and thus it's fiendishly difficult to account for what listeners report that they hear.
Having said all that, I have to wonder whether this is at least partially a troll. Someone that sells artistic goods on their web site (which at a quick glance actually look pretty cool) and owns an RWA amp doesn't strike me as the typical profile for someone advancing the 'numbers are everything' argument.
