John, welcome. We appreciated reading your thoughtful post. I'll comment on your observation that sometimes people get tired of the term "similarly good". Ian briefly touched on this in his reply to you, and the reality in my view is as he stated: differences among audio components where audible differences do it fact exist(i.e., speakers)are far less than sometimes stated. Terms which have no reasonable application in this connection, e.g. "huge", "night-and-day", "blows away", etc., are sometimes casually thrown about. Hopefully thoughtful listeners wouldn't get tired of a term that in many cases is simply a statement of reality.
