… Then there’s the whole aspects of pscyhoacoustics playing into this, which is very interesting.
A lot of the time when people complain about things like converters or op-amps etc sounding bad the playback is actually quite transparent. On the flip side, a lot of the time people praise things for sounding good, they actually color the sound more. Perception is very funny, and there are a lot of factors in play.
Interestingly, Elektron packaged the exact same reverb algorithm across five separate devices, yet people think it sounds different on each machine. The reason why is that each machine has a different kind of sound source (e.g synthesis vs sampling, analog vs digital etc) and a different way of interacting with the same reverb.
Things like the user interface will have an effect on perceived sound quality. Something that looks and feels great to use will likely be perceived as sounding a bit better. Making great sounding DSP algorithms is only half the battle - you need to package it in an attractive way too.
I think when you approach a piece of hardware you expect it to do something to your sound, so in the case of more transparent-sounding instruments I think there is a cognitive dissonance happening. You expected it to sound ‘better’ because it’s in this shiny box, but it sounds virtually the same. This is just my thoughts around it, don’t take it as facts at all - but there are many, many times where people have said that X has better Y than Z, and often the case has been the opposite.