I should have just said midrange and treble peaks are obviously audible, as pretty much anyone's ears will attest, and it's not sensible to rely on someone's data to disprove what's obvious. There's a reason why the term peaky came to prominence in the early days of microphones, phono cartridges, and speakers. People should certainly use their own ears, rather than rely on data that might not even be applicable, such as this now apparent reference to a study on bass peak inaudibility to refute midrange peak audibility. The Soundstage article is an example of how this stuff can be contagious. It's no help that in audio, people can hear what's not there and miss what is there based on expectation bias.
And by the way, narrow bass peaks are audible, but that audibility depends on whether the music happens to hit the particular note(s) with peaks. We've all noticed this, at least in our cars. Avoidance of those notes can occur only if music is the source material, rather than a sweep or a half-step sequence of tones. I think it's worth noting also that avoidance of certain bass tones can be arranged when music is the source.
Toole collected data that indicated which dispersion convention is prevalent, but represented it as indicating which dispersion convention is better. As far as I know, he hasn't renounced it to this day. Was this misrepresentation or incompetence? I know there's a rule of thumb that says, when trying to discern the basic impetus behind problematic behavior, one should bet on incompetence over intention, but in this case I'd say it's a coin flip.
As I mentioned, there's at least one speaker manufacturer that's long been all-in on using this data to support its design philosophy (not Harmon). If Toole were to change his mind about the meaning of his data, that would be awkward, and of course, many in the speaker industry would be affected, since Toole is so widely cited. So, is a guy who provides positive feedback to the industry in the guise of scientific inquiry a compromised agent, or is he incapable of scientific inquiry and conveniently taken advantage of by the industry? Either way, he might yet stumble upon data that proves something new and interesting, but the inaudibility of high Q peaks is never going to be one of them.
I've only gone into this because I think reality is important. Sharp peaks are audible, and something is wrong when it becomes possible to publish delinals of this fact and have this denial spread beyond the source rather than be summarily ignored. I'm at least partially presenting my POV on the state of the industry in the process. I don't wish to enter into a personal feather tossing session with Toole. As goes his integrity, I have no opinion.