[QUOTE=skeptic
"Why don't you define better. Does better mean more expensive? Does it mean those guys over at Stereophile Magazine gave it a higher rating, A minus instead of B plus."

With a few exceptions, I seriously doubt anyone at Stereophile has heard the components I own and certainly none of their writers have heard the whole shebang together.

"What is usable? A turntable with lower wow, flutter, and rumble is usable improvement up to a point. Once those are below the threshold of audibility, further improvements no longer matters. When rumble is minus 100 db, it won't sound any quieter if it gets down to minus 1000 db."

True but there are other factors that make turntables sonically different from one another.

"How about a cartridge which tracks at lower pressure and less distortion. That's usable. A lot of cartridges track at a gram and a half to two grams, have a high frequency peak, are hand made in small batches so no two are quite alike, and cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Do you call that usable? I don't. "

I don't, either. Consequently, I only enjoy MC cartridges that do NOT have high frequency peaks. The only cartridge I've listened to with much regularity that tracks at very low pressure sounds very flat and unlifelike i.e more distortion from a sonic viewpoint. There's that personal taste again.

"How about amplifiers which put out a few miserable watts so that the user is restricted to about three percent of the loudspeakers on the market yet these amplifiers cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Is that usable performance? Or what about amplifiers that cost thousands that don't offer any benefit in terms of distortion, frequency response, bandwidth, or power output over amplifiers which only cost hundreds."

Amps with a "few miserable watts" may sound more like live music. Wattage in and of itself isn't "usable performance", at least not in my lexicon. Some of the foulest sounding amps out there have more power than most of us would ever need. Conversely, some of the finest sounding amps have 25 watts or less - which consequently is more than I need. It's all about sound.

"How about a $3000 pair of loudspeakers consisting of one or two 8" woofers and a 1" tweeter in a pair of 200 pound cabinets which can't reproduce the bottom two octaves of audible sound and if you say Mr. manufacturer what about it, he tells you to spend another $1500 on a subwoofer and figure out yourself how to integrate it with the rest of the system. What kind of crap is that?"

How about the myriad of sub-$1000 loudspeakers (or even more expensive) that CAN give you the bottom two octaves but sound like cats fighting in the treble, or like singers are holding megaphones in the midrange, or bass that hangs in your room and sounds like thumpy syrup? Based on your posts over the years, you buy components based on sound rather than pure numbers. So what's with THIS post???

"And not one control incorporated by the manufacturer of any of it to help the end user adjust for unknown variables it will confront in its installation. Not a tone control, not a tweeter or midrange level control. " .[/QUOTE]

Agreed. The argument is that we have to suffer through bad recordings. The problem is we may also have to suffer with certain anomalies in the room. Some user adjustments are often necessary.