I can only assume people fall in love with an amp, then trade it a few months later, because they don't really have a clear idea of what sound they're looking for. I'm personally guided by "how close does it sound to live music?" So that's maximum tonal accuracy and realistic reproduction of the original venue, plus great imaging. In my experience the most reliable way to judge that is only with acoustic, unamplified recordings. For amplified music the original venue is a recording studio, which has no acoustic. So if I was using some studio track, however great it sounded, to decide which amps or speakers I liked best, I'd probably never decide, because you can pretty-up a miked voice or amplified guitar eighteen different ways, and there's no real standard for what something should sound like. It's all manufactured. In the mixing room they can do whatever they want to the musicians; whereas a string quartet (say) is just naked on stage. I don't want my rig to be a second mixing board.
I think a lot of the high-end amps out there have a sound that you can either like or not, but not necessarily one that just sets out to recreate the unadorned live experience. If a manufacturer's ideal is "smooth" or "euphonious" or "great bass and sweet highs" he's not taking a holistic approach to amplification. He's fixated, however consciously or not, on some part or parts of the ideal and not the whole thing. So I've heard amps that sound really
good coming through the speakers, but it's not always the same good as
real, as long as you're holding the general aural memory in your brain of what that wind octet or string ensemble really sounds like in person. This is why I can't get really sold on any pure tube amp that I've so far heard (and I haven't heard 'em all); the ultimate realism just isn't there. You can't recreate an honest-to-god flute or oboe when you're coloring the sound with tube distortion. It may still sound cool, and it will undoubtedly make Pop Star X's voice sound really enticing, but at the end of the day I want that pure & simple flute or oboe. So I figure the best amp should sound like nothing at all. Not too wet, not too dry, nothing accentuated, nothing cheated.
It's also a blessing not to have the luxury or opportunity of hearing everything that's out there, which could lead to madness...Especially when you're mixing and matching this amp with that preamp, etc. I would hate to have to "compensate" for an amp's shortcomings with a different preamp, or vice versa. They should both just get out of the way and let the music come through. Soften this strident amp with that tube preamp, no thank you. The amp should just reproduce whatever stridency is upstream from it, not contribute any of its own. Take it back to the source, clean that up, and then don't f%$* anything up on your way downstream.
Finally, I have little doubt that all these mega amps do the job pretty well, that any of them would be a keeper if you had a bit less disposable income for amps, and that people tend to fetishize relatively small differences....
Well, that turned out to be damn windy, but oh well, those are me thoughts on the matter.
