The best is whatever you prefer. There is no intellectual way to establish actual factual superiority without measurements and these forums generally decline that pathway when it is presented. This is an emotional experience that cannot be assessed and evaluated by cold, unfeeling machines.
So -- we pirouette endlessly basking in polysyllabics and wielding cliches and formulae to no end whatsoever.
Macrojack, it may interest you to know that those cold unfeeling machines have been used to measure the reactions in human brains to musical reproduction. This work was/is being done by Dr. Herbert Melcher, of Noble Prize fame. He found that as musical reproduction contains more and more artifacts that violate our human perceptual rules, that the processing of the music moves from the emotional centers (limbic system) of the brain to the cerebral cortex. This is why some systems evoke toe-tapping and others do not.
Based on this work and research I have done as well, I do not agree *entirely* with what you stated in the quote. What the 'best' is has to do with how well the equipment is able to conform to human perceptual rules, both known and unknown. I thought you might find it interesting that Dr. Melcher has actually been getting objective numbers on the subjective experience :)
