Comment by floatingatoll

I have a hard-won TDS meter that lets me measure the total dissolved solids in a cup of coffee.

Like music, coffee is an entirely subjective experience. Like music, distilling it down to data does _not_ implicitly destroy the experience. Judging a cup of coffee good or bad solely based on data is impossible. Maybe this cup is intentionally overextracted and that song is intentionally overmastered. That doesn’t guarantee that the coffee or song are good or bad, it simply helps you understand why you do or don’t like it.

After making a thousand cups of coffee with a TDS meter, I can predict what would make a cup of coffee better without needing the meter anymore, and I’ve learned that I care more about enjoying coffee than I do about perfecting it.

If you sat through a blind test of a thousand songs, and at the end discovered that you _can_ distinguish 16/44 from 32/384, you might still _choose_ not to care. Most people don’t want every cup of coffee to be competition grade because it’s really expensive (density sorting), really difficult (dual-wielding flow-restricted kettles), and the payoff isn’t worth it every day to them. Maybe that’s how you’d feel after A/B testing 1,000 songs, as I did after pouring 1,000 cups. Maybe not.

For most people, knowing that 16/48 is indistinguishable or better than 32/384 will save them thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of audio setup, tuning, design, repurchasing, etc.

For a few people, it’s worth it to them to go competition, either in coffee or in music. That’s certainly their right, but it’s not at all guaranteed to make them any happier than they would be with 16/48.