The answer is that there is no one culture, there are many sub-cultures. After you've been here a while you'll begin to understand where certain people are coming from. One strong undercurrent of thought some people advocate is that you can't objectively compare how different products sound without blinded tests, and some people insist that double-blinded tests are required for ensuring the integrity of the testing process. Others believe single-blind tests are sufficient for some tests, while others question the efficacy of comparison testing of audio equipment altogether. For example, the person who started the poll, Gene, is not one of the people making all of these double-blind arguments, as you can see if you read the thread carefully.
It can take a thick skin to post on this site, depending on your personality. A lot of people may disagree with you regardless of what position you take, and often when they don't agree it gets into a right-or-wrong discussion. We often joke about some topics that bring out this behavior, like cables sounding different, the usefulness of passive bi-amping, or the ever popular DACs can sound different or amplifiers can sound different topics. If you want to have one of these discussions, just be prepared for a colorful thread, or at least get ready to have your judgment impugned.
If I may offer one caution and associated piece of advice, there are some very technically capable people who post on this site. There are electrical engineers, speaker designers, people trained in hard sciences, speaker and component manufacturers... it's a very interesting crowd. You should feel free to speak your mind, but when you want to talk about how something works, or make assumptions about how something should be designed, or you just want to assert that A is better or worse than B, it is good to have some technical depth of knowledge behind you, or you can find yourself tripping over your own posts.
