I never said that a $200 CD player will sound exactly like a $2000 one, but rather that if somebody makes the claim that it does, the buyer owes it to himself to verify that claim by a blind test. To spend money blindly, or worse yet, letting somebody else convince one to spend money blindly is just plain stupid, stupid, stupid.

There are differences between components which I've heard which have stood the reality check of a blind test, and some which have not.

Hey, I'm a composer and pianist myself, and even I wouldn't be so arrogant to say that somehow the electrons which represent my music are so special that they behave any differently than electrons carrying radar data or whatever.

Musical creation doesn't follow any scientific rules (rules of convention sure, but not scientific ones), but the electrons which represent that music through wires and semiconductors certainly do.

There's entirely too much voodoo circulating in the audio world. If you think two components sound different, and that can be verified by a blind test, then fine, they sound genuinely different. If they cannot be statistically told apart in a blind test, then the differences are all in your mind.