Again, an incorrect assumption.
I repeatedly see references to 70 volt products introducing loss and not being high fidelity. I've tried to figure out how to convince you that it is product selection, not the technology, where the loss is introduced! I'm thinking I should not continue to care. That's more 70 volt jobs for those of us who know about it.

One last attempt: yes, a market exists for crap fidelity 70 volt audio. It's the supermarket ceiling, the elevator, the hallway, where people want sound but have no interest in spending another penny to have high fidelity.

The fact that this market exists does not mean that high fidelity 70 volt equipment does not exist.

If the only 8 ohm speakers you ever heard were in portable radios, you'd think there is no high fidelity 8 ohm product. That's about where most of us are in relation to 70 volt: we've never heard better and we've not seriously looked into it.

There is a loss of fidelity at the low and high end of all the small tapped transformers in VCs. Period. EOD> for you it may not matter.
There is very little loss of energy in a properly setup system, that I will agree with.

If you plot the frequency response of the small matching transformers or volume control transformers, you will see some roll off at the extremes and if you run a square wave through them, there will not be much left. I would not want to wire my $tate of the art $peaker$ through a garden variety autotransformer volume control -- 70V or whatever.

That said, given the alternatives in large commercial systems, 70V sounds great and results in a manageable system at a practical cost.

While I tend toward the high end of things, the 70V commercial systems that I've done have thrilled the customer -- I don't use cheap speakers. And, I'll use a dBx processor to limit and compress the life out of things. To an audiophile this is a sin beyond description, however, there is no point in attempting to run a high dynamic range into an office, restaurant, or bar. The customers don't know why things sound so good (it must be magic), but it's the best restaurant sound that they've heard.

The bottom line -- use technology that is appropriate for the problem being solved.

That is a great analogy.