The problem here is that the audio industry in general has been lying for a very long time- decades. If a manufacturer, dealer or distributor's lips are moving, he's lying. Seems like everyone says they have the 'best' and the English language being what it is there can only be one 'best'.
The result is everybody is so used to this that they have to take the stuff home and actually see if it works for them. The problem then is that you can't listen to everything, and quite often two people who have radically different experiences and equipment use exactly the same language to describe some pretty different phenomena.
In this context there can be no best- only bedlam.
If you narrow the field, it becomes possible to make some distinctions. For example, I am safe even though I say it myself, in saying that the MP-1 is the best tube preamp at driving long interconnects. There are solid state preamps that can do the same thing, but in the long interconnect department in the tube world there are very few players.
So if might be that if this thread is to go anywhere and be useful, that we create the distinctions that are important, like the long cable example- like, who is the best at working with low output moving coil without step-up devices? I would make a distinction between tube and transistor so that there will be two answers, since we likely will not solve the tube /transistor debate in this thread...
