HI-FI NEWBIE NEEDS HELP!

I am not so sure this community is that knowledgeable about test protocol (and science is not a democracy I am afraid). Mind you, I recently did post some links to controlled tests that produced exactly the result that I claim. Do you have tests that demonstrate the contrary, or scientific data that prove/suggest that the kind of measured imperfections that we see in good electronics are above the threshold of human hearing acuity? There are enough audio professionals who will argue exactly as I do.

There are many silly stories going round here about the sonic character of amplifiers. If an amplifier is any good it will not gave a sonic character, even in the most revealing system. So my simple suggestion is to get a matching Emotiva with enough power to drive your speakers easily (more power is always better). Emotiva makes excellent stuff for realistic prices. If you want to spend more, get a Bryston for really bombproof engineering without any voodoo science.
And by the way, if anyone duped you into spending serious money on cables, you know that was a snake oil seller. Just return/sell the stuff and save some money. Emotiva themselves have excellent cables for a decent price.

So you claim that your hearing is better than e.g. an Audio Precision Audio Analyzer? Do you  have evidence for this?

Have you ever participated in a controlled experiment on this? I have, and it was a sobering experience (I expected to be able to tell them apart). So, can you substantiate your claim under controlled conditions? If you can you can earn the free Harbeth speaker of your choice that Alan Shaw has offered as a reward.

I have already answered you before about my experiences and my current setup (why do you keep asking). And no I do not claim all guitars sound the same. Amplifiers are not musical instruments, and they should not be. And indeed, I do not rate many tube amplifiers very highly - they may sound euphonic but that is not the same as accurate.

I do not doubt that you have heard differences, by the way. Apart from possible differences because you may have compared inaccurate tube amplifiers, the most common cause of perceived sonic differences is differences in loudness level. If that occurs, you do indeed hear a difference in ’sound quality’ - that is how the human brain interprets these level differences. Remove those loudness differences, and the sound quality differences disappear as well. But mind you, the remaining differences have to be very small - below about 0.2 dB, and you can only achieve that by using a good Volt meter on the speaker outputs. Just try and you will be amazed.

Read this first: https://medium.com/@skikirkwood/truth-lies-and-fraud-in-the-audiophile-world-a365e56c97c4

Thank you sir. I hate to admit that there are moments that I want to stop, with all the abuse that gets thrown at me.

cleeds, you are so tiresome in your deliberate misrepresentation of what I say.
1 It was suggested that I think everything sounds the same.
2 My answer was that this may be true in the case of electronics if some conditions are met. But those conditions do matter, and I have repeatedly stated them here. I have also repeatedly backed them up with emperical evidence. If you have empirical evidence to the contrary, you are welcome to present it.
3 The other part of my answer was that speakers and room interaction produce far from perfect results. I do not think that is controversial.

Just read my posts more carefully. I am not saying that everything sounds the same. I have argued that amplifiers may sound differently for a few identifiable and avoidable reasons commonly ignored by audiophiles, and not for the magic reasons that they think. Amplifiers are clipping on input if there is a gain mismatch between the output of a source and the input of the amplifier, they may have a load dependent frequency response (largely a tube isssue) and they may be clipping on output because of insufficient power. Finally there is also an observational issue when sighted comparisons are made at different levels, and with too much time in between. The result has been too much agonizing over electronics and too much budget allocated to them. For the industry this is attractive because this is where the profit margins are (I will not even mention the cable folly).
I have also argued that the links of the chain at the interface between the mechanical and the electrical are far more flawed than people seem to think, and deserve more attention and a bigger slice of the budget (my argument is not that good audio is cheap). This is easily demonstrated by even the most basic and uncontroversial measurements. The explanation is simple, and nothing more than mainstream physics: these components have mass, and mass vibrates, is slow, and behaves in a nonlinear way. So microphones are imperfect, even the best ones (but this is out of our hands), and so is the vinyl link of the chain, and at the final end of the chain so are the speakers and their interaction with the room. For this simple reason I have abandoned vinyl years ago, and for the same reason I have bought what I think of as the best speakers money can buy (Quad electrostats, i.e. dipoles with less room interaction, and yes I listened to them), and applied room equalization to deal with the room modes generated by my sub (and yes I can easily hear the improvement).
In all its simplicity the argument is nothing more than that you do well to allocate your money to reduce the biggest errors in the reproduction chain. The strategy is a simple combination of science and engineering principles and economics: what is the marginal sonic utility of an extra $1000 spent on speakers compared to an extra $1000 spent on electronics? How does an improvement in electronics distortion from for example 0.002% to 0.001% compare to the sonic benefits of a reduction in speaker distortion from 2% to 1%? In the first case you go from 2.002% to 2.001%, in the latter from 2.002% to 1.002%. You can do a similar sum with frequency response, where good electronics can easily stay within 0.2 dB, but speakers have a very hard time staying with 2 dB. Their real world in-room response is even far worse. So I did start a discussion of room acoustics, but that has fizzled out for apparent lack of interest. So no, I will not claim that all gear sounds the same, or that no improvements are possible.

Distortion and resolution are intimately related: with distortion you lose resolution. However, you are right there is a level at which distortion or non flat response become irrelevant, once they dive below the threshold of human hearing. That was exactly my point.
But how do you define loss of data or detail?

noromance, that then would be the distortion level that humans cannot hear. Indeed, there is enough research that we can tolerate or not even discern quite high levels of distortion.
My question was, however, how resolution is lost if it is not by such distortion?