I think that's stretching things a bit AK.  Someone saying that, in their opinion, a Sim i-5 sounds or measures worse than a Rotel 1062 hardly constitutes libel or defamation. 

I don't think that threads like this are useless at all.  It's unfortunate that BD is not prepared to have a reasoned, rational debate about the issue and just spouts out absolutisms everywhere but the subjectivist/objectivist debate is a very important one IMO.

We buy equipment by how it sounds, yes, but imagine if it were possible to measure "how it sounds"?  I suspect this is much more possible than most people would believe.  As I said before, I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a pretty strong correlation between how well a bit of kit measures and its subjectively rated performance (under blind conditions of course).

Personally, I'm of the opinion that the audio/hifi industry has gone WAAAAY to far into subjectivist territory, to the point where, for many people any kind of objective measurement whatsoever is deemed completely irrelevant.  This is a very unfortunate situation indeed.

I'll post again the link to a most excellent article on the matter which I suggest everyone here reads.  I have to say I agree strongly with the guy on pretty much every point he has to make:

http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm

It's my view that if more people in the industry held views like Douglas Self and more hifi was designed to objectively measureable criteria that we would all benefit from kit that sounded considerably better for a fraction of the price.  However, that's very unlikely to happen.  If Wavac can sell a SET amp for $350K that has 10% THD and there are mugs prepared to buy them then you can see that the manufacturers have an interest in sticking to subjectivism because, without objective measurement, anything goes.  HiFi becomes like art, based entirely on hype and marketing instead of the engineering science that it is and should be regarded as.

Michael.