This is basically the current "holy war" among some audiophiles. There's measurement-intensive approaches likes audiosciencereview and then there's the more subjective things like "soundstage" and "depth" and "clarity".
That's why it's so fun, though. Audio reproduction can be measured objectively but the experience of listening to something can only be measured subjectively. Ultimately, if the $5k D-Link router sounds better to someone, who am I to argue?
I have a mid-fi setup by audiophile standards, but it's still more of an investment than most people I know have made. When asked for advice, I tell people to focus on what sounds good to them. If it sounds good, then it _is_ good, assuming one isn't buying something to impress others.
Also, if they ask nicely, I'll give them a discount on my optimized-for-their-CPU-architecture, hand-coded, machine language version of malloc, free, and memcpy.
That's why it's so fun, though. Audio reproduction can be measured objectively but the experience of listening to something can only be measured subjectively. Ultimately, if the $5k D-Link router sounds better to someone, who am I to argue?
I have a mid-fi setup by audiophile standards, but it's still more of an investment than most people I know have made. When asked for advice, I tell people to focus on what sounds good to them. If it sounds good, then it _is_ good, assuming one isn't buying something to impress others.
Also, if they ask nicely, I'll give them a discount on my optimized-for-their-CPU-architecture, hand-coded, machine language version of malloc, free, and memcpy.