Clearly, what he meant by "Earbuds" was "consumer-grade stuff that came with the device", and not "IEMs" as a whole.

N800 sounds fine on my Grado SR-80s: very little (if any) hiss that I can discern.

The "amplifier lesson" is wrong. The proper lesson is that, while electronic technology in general has improved by huge amounts, amplification technology has not. Tubes still produce the best sound, followed by transistors, and then ICs. It's just that it hasn't gotten much cheaper to make tubes.

So how do you distinguish an audiophile form a rich audiophilistine? One has really old tech s/he swears by.