[Joe Bloggs]

I won't even go into any product genre specifics here.

Why do a certain class of audiophiles insist that someone try something before dissing it as if it were a self evident logical requirement?

Imagine what would happen to the world if, say, pedophiles the world over held their critics to the same standards... And they agreed to this requirement...???

:blink:

This frightening thought just crossed my mind and I could not help but voice it. No offense to audiophiles the world over (me included) and our hobby but... Really? h34r:

 

[Speedskater]

I would say that any product that makes unsupportable claims has in itself made a strong reason for not trying it.

 

[Argyris]

Pharmacists in the late 19th century used to claim that cocaine treated...well, just about everything. Arsenic and other toxic substances too. The claims for patent medicines read an awful lot like a health-flavored version of the claims made about audio gear today, and the advertisements encouraged people to load up on all of it to see if it helped.
 
It wasn't until we started to actually understand what these substances are and what they're doing that we determined that, apart from the obvious addictive and/or toxic effects, they weren't actually solving a lot of the problems people claimed they were. People were just imagining it because it said so on the bottle (or, in the case of stuff like heroin, because they were drugged out of their minds, but that's a different issue). Once we started challenging the claims on the bottles we learned that, at best, this stuff was placebo, and over time we advanced our understanding of medicine to the point that we didn't need to try every single new substance anymore to determine whether or not it had magic locked inside. In much the same way, I don't need to try a particular amp, DAC or cable to see if it's somehow different since I know that, given its measurements are not going to be sufficiently different from those of any other properly functioning and competently designed piece of similar equipment as to be distinguishable by human hearing, neither I nor anyone else will be able to detect a difference.