[Joeboy]

> You've never listened to audiophile equipment have you?

You're saying that I ought to judge the merits of audiophile equipment by the subjective measure of whether I like the sound of it. Which is the metric I said audiophiles would favour.

> If apply "some soft clipping" it will sound bad

Soft clipping often sounds nice, which is why it's very commonly applied to music. You're saying that eg. the sound of a classic Vox amp is bad, which I guess you're free to believe if that's what your ears tell you, but it's certainly not an objective truth.

[SomeoneFromCA]

Because what you are describing is a simplistic picture, describing whole class of people as stupid simpletons who cannot tell low THD and low IMD audio from "soft clipping which sounds nice". If you are referring to vacuum tube amps, soft clipping is only partially the reason why they sound the way they do; in fact most of the time amps are not clipping and are outputting close to 1% of their their total power. Reasons why tube equipment sounds better/different from the solid state amps are a lot more complex than the "common wisdom" of soft clipping.