In the '80s, it was trashed. No, we're not talking about Motley Crue, but we are in fact talking about harmonic distortion - you know, the villain of audio. During the "specs wars," watts ruled and distortion was the fool, and as we look at the landscape and the modern audiophile takes on the matter, not a ton has changed. With curious, useless specs like THD+Noise floating around out there, we wonder if the understanding of distortion has matured along with much of our technology in the last 40 years.