Former mastering engineer here. Discussing audio gear in any open online forum is pretty hopeless. Any conversation will eventually be dominated by people who

Former mastering engineer here. Discussing audio gear in any open online forum is pretty hopeless. Any conversation will eventually be dominated by people who misunderstand (often willfully) the human perceptual mechanism and its propensity for illusion. It's possible to talk about effects on the edge of perception: the protocols for the tests by which perceptual codecs are assessed and incrementally improved had to be designed somehow. But you basically cannot have such conversations unless every participant accepts their own fallibility and blind testing as the price of admission, which is only going to happen with a closed group.