I've not seen E. Brad Meyer's devastating follow up, can you point me to it? In any case, M-M tested the then-current reports, totally anecdotal, very often seen in publications and online, that the difference between *any* 'hi rez' release (*regardless of whether it was sourced from analog *) and its CD counterpart was 1) obvious and 2) due to Hi rez (with the SACD or DVDA pretty much invariably sounding better). Their results provided no support for those claims. Given how much against the audiophile grain such data go, it's obviously important for hi rez advocates, including those who think that their 'training' and 'experience' privileges their hearing of it (it's funny how many of you there are), to insist that MM has no evidentiary worth. But their insistence that MM fails on the grounds that MM didn't use exclusively DSD or hi-rez PCM-sourced discs, is contemptibly post-hoc. The pre-MM claim in the biz (including the hi-end press) was *NEVER* that 'you can only really hear the obvious benefits of hi rez if you have a purely hi rez signal chain'. Nor was it 'you need to be a SPECIALLY TRAINED LISTENER to hear the superiority of hi rez".
Face it: in the normal course of listening, whatever difference you, yes, even you, think you hear isn't likely due to 'hi rez', but to simple mastering difference. And in the abnormal course of listening, i.e., if you're in fact actually comparing a hi rez release to a properly downconverted copy, you're probably not hearing a real difference at all. Gee, now, who already offered up results like that.....?