As Trelja said, your points are indeed excellent, SD, I however beg to differ on one minor issue. I doubt that aural memory is so shortlived, especially not with musical renderings you are intimately familiar with down to the tiniest detail. It is a familiarity I am talking about, which only comes after much exposure to that given piece of music. If comparing gear with that sort of background, it becomes difficult to fool the ear/brain. I know of quite a few occasions, having spent a lot of money, where I deeply wished to hear a difference to the better, be it in dynamics, in voicing, in what have you and was bitterly disappointed. As I had pointed out in other threads ( and was ridiculed by the so called objectivists ) you can train your hearing discrimination, like you can train any other form of perception and the better you are trained and the more parameters you have to apply your disciminative abilities to, the lesser is the chance that you will fall into the trap of selfdeception. Mind you, you cannot entirely avoid the dangers of "wishful hearing", so its good policy to call other sets of good ears in, who are not emotionally involved with the new gear under test and hence will just tell you what they hear. Basically of course,its VERY true, that ears adjust very quickly to any change and will fool you into sensing, that everything is as it should be. So its often the first few seconds of exposure that really count, the first impression, which often enough will dissipate quickly into a sham normalcy and this especially if you want it to be so. So besides using material, you are deeply familiar with, to my experience it is often the very first impression, which might tell you more about the effects of a given change to your system than long listening sessions.
