And this is what it comes down to. Rigorous test conditions, statistical shenanigans that show the result is 99.99% significant blah blah. But at the end of the day, whether it is worth a damn comes down to "Do you really buy into the idea..?" because no one can prove whether people do lose their critical abilities as soon as they are put under pressure. This is limitation of blind testing procedures #1.All I know is that every single time I put ardent audiophiles under the most unobtrusive of controls, they totally lose their ability to discern differences they claim to find under sighted conditions.
Even if their claims of stress due to the listening conditions are true (which personally I dont buy into), all it shows is that the differences they suddenly cant hear are totally trivial. Do you really buy into the idea that they go significantly deaf because they are being tested?
There are thousands more. Because we are dealing with complex biological and psychological systems, no one can really say whether 10 minutes of car noise ruins your critical faculties for 2 hours after that - because no one has tested for it. Or whether listening to music you like swamps your critical faculties, or if music you don't like prevents you from engaging sufficiently with it. Or if repeated listening to one piece of music kills all ability to 'hear' it. etc. etc.
Thank goodness that the people who design useful, reasonably-priced amplifiers and DACs and so on simply design them to spec as straightforward electronic circuits rather than in response to the listening tests that people bizarrely think have contributed anything to the world of audio! Amplifiers and DACs are still flat to 20 kHz and aim to generate as close to zero noise and distortion as possible. Listening tests have made no difference to that, nor how it is achieved!