The second hand market is no arbiter of a product's quality it simply shows that people chop and change kit, there's no broad indication of reasoning behind the purchase or sale.
AN and DCS are at opposite ends of the market one invests in digital design and advanced production and manufacturing the other spends their money on esoteric parts, materials and hand assembly. DCS is all about the math, AN most certainly aren't.
There's no reason why an individual listener 'should' prefer better measurements over worse, and certainly not once sighted bias is and retailer showmanship is factored into a demo. That on average people trend towards the more neutral measuring kit en masses under blinded test conditions tells you nothing about the taste of outliers.
Coming up with a vaguely technology valid sounding reason as to why a subset of people seem to like a fundamentally broken implementation of cd playback is nothing more than conjecture. Here's a difference, people must like it because of that difference, that's not how science works, that's not how you remove confounding variables from a comparison and identify what people are actually responding to.
Yes, the problem with reading the blind tests is that when they are conducted by Harmon - a company selling speakers - this is what is called a "conflict of interest" and when has any reviewer who references a Harmon speaker ever remotely mentioned a conflict of interest. Then when Martin Colloms of Ho-Fi Critic or Hi-Fi Choice does a line-level matched test - gee the results are quite different! Martin Colloms had a group of lead designers from top audio companies come in and listen to SS amplifiers in the $3000 range and the guys who designed these amps all chose a $100 used low feedback Radford tube amplifier.
I think it is easier to sell the math - let's face it no one auditions as much anymore - they buy audio like they buy a PC or laptop - look at the numbers i7 is better than i5 and more pixels on the printer is better etc. My DAC has an ESS Sabre 9016 but that is obsolete as it has been replaced 3 times since then with ES9033Q so it MUST be better.
I remember back in the day when Burr-Brown was all the rage - does your CD player use Burr-Brown? They're THE best - I saw the price sheet the most expensive one was $2.47 retail. So a manufacturer probably paid a whole lot less Most were well under $2.
The chips cost diddly. The upper manufacturers are trying them all - some companies want to sell something that will impress Stereophile - and thus the measurements readers. Companies like AN can make stuff they think sounds better because no measurements person is going near a tube amp let alone a SET amp. So they're never getting ANY of those consumers anyway. On another forum, one guy won't even try the stuff on principle - he read that tubes measure poorly so it's a sealed done deal for him. What can you do - you can't argue with people like that so don't.
I live in Hong Kong and Audiophile dream city where I can go to a building and listen to gear on 17 floors - one floor will have YG Acoustics and Constellation and Kharma and Vivid Audio with Kondo and Edge and Soulution. The next will have ATC, Rogue, Line magnetic, Melody, the next will Have Nola Reference grand and Avantgarde and VTL and Ypsilon and the million-dollar Clearaudio turntable and top VPI, the nest will have Harbeths, Sugden, Tannoy, JBL the next will be Analog Domain, Shindo, MBL, Revel, Magepan with Triode Labs, Cayin, Trenner and Freidl, -- it just goes on and on.
And all of their engineers who graduated from university and know all the math make a CHOICE as to go with the measured performance and to veer off it because it just sounds better.
John Curl recently noted the same thing on a youtube video. He said he made a terrific measuring loudspeaker - by technical standards it was great. Yet he didn't like the sound - no good. He went back to amplifiers.
Lastly, most auditions aren't "fair" ( I don't even mean DBT fair) I just mean even subjectively fair. If I listen to dCS on a Bricasti amp through B&W speakers - I am not necessarily hearing the dCS - the sound of the room let's say is bad. Well, if I have only heard this all once - how do I know what is to blame? Maybe the dCS is being messed up but the speakers/room or amp (or all of the above). Maybe it's the dCS that is ruining things and the amp and speakers are just passing the badness forward.