Now, the overdetection issue may in fact come in here.
It's commonly thought that there are 3 levels of "memory", starting with the near-periphery, or what I call "loudness" memory. This is a very detailed, but very fleeting memory. This loudness memory is reduced into a set of features, or middle memory (the psychologists have a fancy name for it) where much information is lost. Finally, feature memory is reduced to conceptual memory, where a great deal more information is lost. (I'm talking auditory here, but visual processing seems to be similar in some respects, of course the details are enormously different.)
In this process, both the middle and higher stages can be guided by expectation, random (or nonrandom) thoughts, attention, etc, and as a result one will remember DIFFERENT THINGS from the same audio stimulus.
By the way, even the partial loudness perception can be somewhat guided by concious thought.
This is a simple consequence of how people work.
This, of course, is one of the reasons that learning is important, but it's also a reason that one MUST have a falsifiable hypothesis in testing auditory stimulii.
It's also a reason that DBT's are may be MORE rather than LESS sensitive than sighted tests, because sighted tests introduce expectations and noise that can INTERFERE with the subjects' concentration.
Now, the Greenhill test was, if I recall correctly, within reasonable bounds as far as things that people would or might use in a system. Some of the wires were small, some large, but in fact such things were and still are sold for use.
I would hesitate to call all of them audiophile uses, perhaps.
As to the speculation about some of the reports, I'm simply not going to comment. I've been called enough names already.
The sensitivity of the ear at low levels, for instance, is remarkably close to the atmospheric (molecular) noise level. Those kinds of observations have been confirmed by DBT. The masking performance of the ear is likewise estimatable by knowledge of neural firing rates, etc, calculated from entirely different information, and it is confirmed quite well in DBT. And so on and so on.
Now, we know "everything"? OBviously not. However, it is still quite possible in the lack of full information to reject hypotheses that can be shown false, or for which the evidence is overwhelmingly negative.
That's all I'll say, sorry, I'm tired of having some of the people here claim "JJ is no scientist", I'm tired of them making accusations of professional misconduct on my part, and so on, so from this point forward (No, Phil, it's not you I'm annoyed with, nor is it John Esc...), I'm simply going to point to the literature.
There's no point in my saying something that is mainstream, pretty hard to question, and that has a great deal of evidence behind it, only to see an obviously coordinated campaign of vilification rain down on me.
JJ - Philalethist and Annoyer of Bullies