I agree with you on all your points here. It was interesting to me that JR's comments, although lengthy as usual for him, were much more coherent and civil than his usual rants that I've read or tried to read in the past. Perhaps his new medication is working well
.
Perhaps this was valid and perhaps not. About 3-6 people at a time took the tests. Some groups did back up and listen to certain passages over and over, and others did not. People also often decided to skip certain types of music as being poor for detecting the very subtle differences said to come from different caps. I'm not sure there was any agreement as to which music passages were the most useful to hear. Each was on his own to examine the music for features that could illuminate any differences between the caps. Because no one knew what exactly these subtle differences were, I thought it was better to allow listeners to try various musical passages for themselves, rather than for the test organizers to preselect music for the listeners. Afterwards, both Bob Cardell and Dennis Murphy, who administered the tests, admitted that they could not hear any differences at all between capacitors, and that is why they couldn't select music passages for standard use during the tests.
I was actually one of the 5 people whose score approached significance. I selected correctly 8 out of 12 times. (Note that I said "approached significance". That is the same as saying "not statistically significant".) This is 2 hits better than random guessing leading to 6 out of 12, and 2 hits worse than a convincing score of 10 out of 12. The one listener who scored 9 out of 12 really preferred the cheap caps. So his score was actually 3 out of 12, but odds of randomly getting 9 of 12 or 3 of 12 are really the same.
During the test, I thought that I had learned to discern very small and subtle differences between the caps. I could try to describe these different sounds here, but I don't know whether it was for real or just so much mental masturbation. (I also don't want to influence anyone who may be part of the tests in Dayton and elsewhere.)
After the tests were done, I was very interested in finding out what audible features other people perceived (that word includes heard and/or thought they heard) as being different between the caps. In talking to 3 others, all of whom were equally convinced that they could hear
it as I was, I found that we all had focused on completely different features in the music when we thought we could hear
it. We also got differing scores. So we were hearing, or believing we were hearing, quite different features. So, I'm not sure that using short repeated passages of music that were standard for everyone would have helped.