It’s easy to argue that our entire experience of reality is fabricated by the brain based on very little information and a lot of preconceptions to give us a convincing experience in "real time". If you have some interest in this, research in the last decade or so has been amazing(so much is still unknown of course).
But instead of losing myself in another passion and generalities, I think the big variable here is that we’re concerned with mostly identical sounds and trying to find the little differences(DACs after all are high precision high fidelity devices, usual more accurate than amps and always more accurate than transducers). That puts us in a particular scenario where there can be some difficulty satisfying the desire or expectation for perceived sound differences. As I mentioned before, when confronted to a difficult question, the brain loves to replace it with an easier one, often without us being aware. And that’s when the reliability of our experience manufactured by the brain becomes not so reliable.
It might seem super far fetched, but we do this all the time, usually with satisfying results. When you get in a room, you don’t look at everything in great details, you use very little data to construct a perception of the room driven by many assumptions about what you expect to find in a room. The eye always has your nose in view but you don’t notice it(well now maybe you do). There is a blind spot in each eye but you aren’t even aware of that when you look around. You don’t see double.The area of your vision that is sharp(full HD!) Is a small patch within your field of view and for you to see any detail somewhere, you must look at it precisely with that area aligned. You don’t really think about any of that and your eyes just jumps around from places to places while gathering information(almost never doing a full "HD” scan. And yet all this time your brain gave you a coherent and believable "view” of the room. It didn’t go black with a buffering message.
All that to say, our brain does a lot behind our back, and our sense of reality is as far as objective as can be. Obviously I’m saying it’s mostly made up, not that there is no order, logic or stability to the fakeness. We’re after all creatures with a mind made almost entirely around experiences and patterns pulled out of those experiences. It serves us well.
But also sometimes, the brain uses one shortcut too many to turn an intense task into a simple one, and it starts making even more stuff up based on a strong desire, some expectations, or another sensory input allowing assumptions about what might be heard(or memory errors). Again, the harder it is to pick up a sound difference, the more likely it is for the brain to go search elsewhere for the answer. I do believe that this is the core aspect of this discussion. Obvious sound differences are obvious. And clear assumptions are helpful. If I’m swimming and see something under water, I probably won’t imagine it was a bunny. I might imagine a shark, but probably not if I’m in a swimming pool 50km from the nearest sea(then again, sharknado). Those extra variables have nothing to do with what I saw under water a moment ago, but they’re assumptions that will guide my wandering mind in a certain direction. That’s just what brains do. Usually it avoids a bunch of nonsensical scenarios. When it works it works great and we don’t even consciously take notice of all those thoughts going on in the background. That’s also why, when the very same tools come up with BS(mostly out of a rule of least effort), we’re usually non the wiser. And small or no differences greatly encourages the brain to look elsewhere for easy assumptions about sound. I wouldn’t even think of bringing all that up when comparing headphones, because the differences are usually massive and obvious.
If you read that far, you’re brave and have already been more punished than you deserved to be.