And Wayne, you are missing my point, and miss reading or miss interpreting what I said.

None of the components were "cheap" they were all very well designed and built units, nothing Chinese. They still differed in price by about 5:1.

And I also never said that no one could hear a difference, they probably could. But you seem to be confusing audibility with preference, which is quite common. They are most distinctly NOT the same thing. Audibility is the much easier thing to test for than preference. I do not doubt for a minute that you could tell the difference between a JBL driver and a cheap Chinese copy.

I do doubt that you could consitantly rank order your preference for three different systems where only the compression driver changed between three different manufacturers of hi-end products - like JBL, B&C and TAD. You and maybe others could probably tell they were different, but I doubt that there would be a statisticaly significant rank ordering of the results.

There is no point in your doing a blind subjective test yourself if you can so causually throw out the results of others, like ours. You either accept blind results or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose the ones you accept and the ones that you don't.

At Ford we did a blind test of three sound systems and asked our eight "expert listeners" to rate them in four categories. Of the eight only two could be relied upon to yield consistant results in a statistical sense.

So while I support blind tests, you guys are going into this thing with a nieve point of view. It's highly unlikely that you will be able to "put this thing to rest" and very likely that you will mess up something making the results null or questionable. These are not trivial things to do and of the tests that I have seen, few have been done to an acceptable standard to be called "scientific." And almost none of them "put things to rest".

For example, two speakers could be inaudibly different, or they could be audibly different. Now just finding out that they are audibly different does not say which one is prefered, that takes another type of test. But just saying that one speaker is prefered, does not say which speaker is more accurate.

All too often listening tests are performed badly and the results are questionable, but then they can be performed correctly, but the results don't say anything about preference or accuracy. Its trival to test for differences, difficut to test for preferences and an extremely difficult test to test for accuracy.

People will most certainly not always pick the most accurate speaker as the one that they prefer. Preference is not accuracy.

Subjective space is very shaky ground - thats hwy I prefer the objective which is far less prone to these pitfalls. But then whenever you quote the objective data someone says "Yea, but it sounds good to me."