There is a lot of truth in what he says. Makes me think back to my first days in high-fi in the 60's and 70's, started off with tube amps (that's all there was) and had a typical system in my teen years, in fact one that might be considered a classic 'vintage' setup these days (a Marantz 1060, Pioneer PL-12D, and larger Advent speakrs.) In the days of analog there was a significant difference in capability of various components at various price points, and even at the same price point. Careful selection was important and could make the difference between a good and great system, even with a similar price total.
Fast forward to today and the world of easily attainable +/- 0.1 dB 20-20,000 hz frequency response, 90 dB+ SNR, and zero wow, flutter, and rumble (what's rumble? :-). The fact is that there just isn't going to be much (if any) audible difference between equipment with specs like these. But you can't sell no difference so vendors and consumers alike go to painful ends to try to discern something, anything, to differentiate them, leading to the pretty amusing examples of this we see today. The last refuge is the physical transducer as there probably always will be differences there, it being the only remaining analog device in the chain. Well, amps operate in the analog domain as well, but as mentioned in the article those have gotten to be very good, to the point that the only differences are the imperfections.
So we are simultaneously both very fortunate to have very high quality (exceeding that which was physically possible at any price a few decades ago) for low prices, and cursed that this is turning hifi into a simple commodity purchase. But there will always be areas where superior knowledge will generate superior results so I think the hobby will always have a future.
Edited by ILikeMusic - 1/2/11 at 7:45pm
