Yeah I recognized people were going to interpret what I said the way you did, and respond in that way due to an ambiguity in what I wrote (my bad
. It is true that if you look at a particular measurement, you can demarcate within that measurement what can actually be heard by the human ear, and what can only be heard through a super sensitive machine. For example: looking at the master SINAD chart for DACs, the human ear might be able to hear the difference in SINAD (whatever that might actually mean to irl listening) between the Matrix Audio X-Sabre Pro and the NAD T758 AVR. But the human ear almost certainly cannot discern the difference between the SINAD of the Matrix Audio X-Sabre Pro and the Okto Research DAC8. However, the machine clearly can tell the difference between the Okto and the Matrix. This illustrates the point that you made, and I don't disagree with that.
In a different vein, my point was that most of the differences in sound that actually make a difference to people in irl listening do not have a specific measurement attached to them, and most likely will never be measurable. For instance, the dynamics, sound stage, and imaging of a particular headphone cannot have a measurement ascribed to them. In order to ever obtain what might look like a "measurement" of those things, you are getting into like hard AI territory, and at that point by nature any "measurements" that might be possible, will be colored by subjectivity. The biggest factor in a headphone based sound system that makes an actual audible difference during listening is the headphones themselves. You can't take a measurement or any group of measurements that will tell you whether the Focal Utopia is "better" than the Meze Empyrean, and make a chart out of it. Thus most of the differences between equipment that are actually discernible are immeasurable. Now that is not to say measurements are useless. Measurements are what keeps people from going out and spending 20K on a DAC, and thinking it sounds better than something like the RME-ADI2. The endeavor to measure the measurable stats of the most popular consumer amps and DACS is venerable and protective of the consumer. However, thinking that every fact about an audio system can be reduced to measurable facts is just flat out wrong, and I don't think there are too many people who believe in a pure reductionist model when talking about headphone systems (or any audio system).