Why are you changing your tune? You've attempted to refute my point
that
the measured distortion is low by claiming that the test equipment is
less
accurate than the auditory system. I've therefore addressed that silly
assertion of yours and demonstrated that it's untrue.

No, you said it's more PRECISE. Why are you blathering on and on when you
can't
tell the difference between accuracy and precision?

I can tell the difference, and I can tell you that the auditory system is
neither accurate nor precise. But precision is what we're interested in
here because we're interested in ddetectability, not the noise in the system
(both of which, by the way, are higher in the auditory system than on
computer screens).

Why are you ignoring me
every single time I tell you this? I can tell you're not stupid. But
you're
stubborn, and you're dead set on "proving" me wrong, even though you can't
find
anything to prove to me that I don't already know.

The following are five things that you don't know but argue against despite
the overwhelming evidence that has been presented to you:
1) that test equipment is more precise (and more accurate) than the human
auditory system.
2) distortion measurements between any two car audio amplifiers behaving
linearly are lower than the distortion thresholds that can be perceived by
humans within the same context.
3) the human auditory system intentionally distorts the incoming signal to
better suit its needs, and this distortion is higher than the distortion
that a microphone introduces into the signal.
4) people who have published papers on human psychophysics and have benched
amplifiers tend to know how to read their instruments, and therefore, there
isn't an epidemic of fabricated data in those fields.
5) controls are important to implement in any test because it allows you to
isolate variables and therefore assign relationships between the
observations and the remaining variables - as such, you cannot pick and
choose which of the variables to assign the observation to.

In the mean time, if human ears can't tell the difference between live
sound and
stereo reproduced sound,

Who said that?

then all the testing equipment and precision in the
world is irrelevant. If human ears can (and almost all the time they
can), then
again testing equipment is irrelevant. Now if these differences are due
to
amplification (which they often are, at least in part), it's because of
distortion of some sort. There are actually many links in the
reproduction
process, and distortion is added at every single step. (This distortion
can be
cumulative. For example, if we had some reproduction system where every
step in
the process reduced the amplitude by .1 dB, then after 10 or so iterations
of
this we'd have a noticeable (by the human ear) difference in amplitude.)

Finally we agree on something.


Now if the human ear can hear distortion and measuring equipment can't,
then
there's something wrong with the measuring equipment, user or technique.

Agreed.

So far
I hope I haven't said anything you'd disagree with, even though you're
chomping
at the bit to do so. Now, why exactly is it so important for you to
believe
that a person can not hear any difference between 2 amps? What
cornerstone of
science will crumble to the ground for you if this is so?

What are you talking about?

You agree (now) that
all amplifiers exhibit distortion.

I always have. I've already dug up one quote to verify this. Must I google
back to the more distant past to try to find even more evidence? A single
quote (whose sole purpose was to clarify my terms) should suffice, no?

What exactly is so hard to swallow when it
can be heard? It happens, and it's measurable (at least in theory) by
machines.
If I can hear a difference between 2 amplifiers and it isn't being
measured,
then there's a problem with the measurement, not with me.

You haven't yet performed this test, even though you think that you have
(see #5 above). And, as I've said at the beginning of the discussion, if
you can demonstrate that you can hear the difference, then you should
publish your results. They would indeed be groundbreaking.