Kind of a weak rant. He takes down a lot of the easy, usual targets like high-def audio and overpriced cables and declares audio reproduction a "mature" technology, meaning he sees little room for improvement, even though he believes live experience is still paramount.

Well, okay, no arguments here but he ignores the one thing most people would agree is a promising avenue - actively controlling dispersion and/or frequency response (with DSP, etc) in ways that could never be accomplished with passive electronics.

I mean, he's obviously aware of that (he points readers to Linkwitz) but he wants to have his cake and eat it too, eh?

The iPods, iPads, iPhones, and earbuds they use are of such low audio quality that what they hear bears no relationship to live music

He's totally misinformed here. Yes, the stock earbuds are atrocious, iPods/iPads/iPhones and the default Apple iTunes/Apple Music SQ experience with 256kbps AAC is really fucking good -- a transparent codec and bitrate and totally adequate DACs means that hundreds of millions of people are one decent set of headphones away from a fantastic audio experience.

And that "decent set of headphones" is now easier to come by than ever -- I'm a firm believer that Beats has been a damn good thing for the audio market. It's totally the "Starbucks" effect -- while Starbucks isn't great, they've opened up the market for decent coffee and it's easier now to find good coffee than it was before the Starbucks explosion of the 1990s. (Also, newer Beats models are apparently an improvement on the old ones? I don't know, I've never heard them really. But I like their effect on the market.)