Gold Phantom review - Steve Huff

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The point I'm trying to make here is that when you are crossing a road and you hear a car coming from your left you jump out of the way because your left ear warned you there's a car coming. Why would you rely on just your left ear that, by your reasoning is totally unreliable, in a life and death situation but need a blind ABX test to hear the difference between two pieces of audio equipment? Please enlighten me because you make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

That's an interesting comparison Pim, but I think it actually undermines your own argument.  Human hearing has evolved (at least partly) to detect danger and in the case of crossing the road, it's an intuitive reaction to stop if you hear something unexpected, dangerous, loud, etc.  On the other hand hearing has not evolved to detect subtle differences between presentation of "the same" audio signals, the result of which depends on many other complicated processes happening in the brain.

On that basis a blind ABX test seems to me to make good sense if you want a reasonably repeatable way to determine whether you (or anyone) can hear differences between two pieces of audio equipment.  Whether it's a good way to choose what you prefer and want to buy is a different question entirely, of course.