Many, many listening experiments fail to note subtle differences. There are just too many variables involved that I think get disregarded.
Agreed. There's a genuine impulse toward rigor in this hobby, but executing real experimental methodology is hard — practically and psychologically. You need controlled conditions, blind protocols, statistical thinking about effect sizes, and enough epistemological honesty to sit with uncertainty rather than reach for a verdict. Most people can't or won't do all of that, which is entirely understandable.
What's less understandable is the confidence that fills the gap. The result is strongly worded claims resting on thin empirical foundations — more heat than light. And I'd add: the cumulative effect is a kind of epistemic degradation, where the *performance* of scientific reasoning gradually substitutes for the thing itself. Forums like this can be genuinely fun and generative, but they also model a debased conception of what evidence and inference actually require.