Amir is wrong or at least short-sighted to stress SINAD, but people just gobble up the concept of battling products based on numbers. Example: "I bet my camera has more megapixels than yours!" Marketers just love this flaw in humans and they often exploit it.
SINAD is two completely different issues smashed together as one metric for no valid perceptual reason other than
"both are examples of undesirable things if they exceed our threshold level of audibility",
namely noise and distortion.
I'm not a big car guy but it would be like ranking cars based on their CSAZSA, pronounced sah-zah. What's that? You've never heard of CSAZSA? Well it combines into one metric the two things which are the most important when considering the purchase of a car: Cargo Space And Zero to Sixty Acceleration.
No he did not stress SINAD as such, in the sense that he did not do so more than manufacturers and other well known reviewers.
I of course have to agreed with you that “smashed”, together 2 metrics isn’t a good thing, but that has been what others have been doing, unfortunately, so I guess he probably just go with the flow. Like the power output in watt, that’s also a “mashed together” metric used to spec/rate/rank power amps, not ideal but..,
As to ranking, SINAD is just picked for convenience and is indeed a good way to compare, because it is a metric that other reviewers/manufacturers would at least use the same standard/protocol, such as 1 kHz sinus, the notable variance is most be not everyone use the same output level and/or input level.
He never recommended a product based only on that one metric, though I do think some of readers who do not have a strong background in audio gear and may not understand the rhmight have done so on their own as they could have been misled by the way he presented the results. You obviously are not one of those simply because of your knowledge in this field.
