Pardon, all I
saw was you acknowledging that you understood solderdude when he made the same point. But if you've addressed it further, please link to it, I can't claim to have read every post here (yet).
This disparity between your fundamental 'prior' -- your claim that you've always clearly heard a difference between nominally bit-perfect audio presentations -- and the difficulty you encountered doing it under controlled conditions, is a proverbial elephant in the room. So it deserves address.
It also illustrates why it's important to not just report ABX successes/failures, but also describe how the testing 'went'. Was it easy or hard?
It is very common for audiophiles to claim they easily, often immediately, hear X 'sighted' -- whether it be cables, speaker break-in, DAC differences, lossy audio. "Even ,y wife could hear it!" It's been the case for as long as I've been participating in the hobby (40 years). Claiming hearing ability like this is
de rigueur among 'high end' journalists writing for
Stereophile, The Absolute Sound, Sixmoons, etc. If real, 'aceing' an ABX should be child's play for such people.
So it irks me if possible audible differences unearthed after shall we say,
considerable listener effort under controlled conditions (indicating that they are, at most, subtle differences, hard to hear even under optimal conditions) are touted as the evidence for such claims. I'd call that shifting the goalposts to claim a win.