So far, this discussion in this forum has in fact been about "the absolute limits of human hearing", and previous claims have always been stated as "no human can hear any difference". Now that I have shown that none of the current tests seems well designed to substantiate THAT claim, because they failed to test a significant portion of the total human population, you seem to be suggesting that we should instead change the claim to "no audiophile on this forum is likely to hear a difference". I have no objection to that change - but note that, in detail, it is a somewhat different topic.
I think a discussion about "what differences are significant enough to justify spending more money on a product" would be quite useful to many people.
However, the goals and intent of such a discussion should be stated, concisely and completely, as just that.
(And it should not disguised as "a purely scientific discussion in the limits of human perception".)
As to your other assertion. As of this point, we have no actual evidence about the relative importance of "listening acuity" and "listening skills" to this particular sort of test. Therefore, we don't actually know what effect the admittedly superior hearing acuity and arguably inferior listening skills of youngsters may have on the results. It may be that children, not knowing what to listen for, hear no difference... or it may be that, even without formal knowledge of what to listen for, they consistently find one device to "sound more like the real thing" than another, because of some tiny difference that the rest of us are unable to hear, which would suggest that there is some sort of audible difference. Clearly nobody has been interested enough to conduct a proper test to determine that either way. And, unless you've actually seen the results of such a specific test, then we're both simply stating our hypotheses on the subject (making educated guesses).
However, yes, I would consider it pretty obvious that superior hearing acuity at least MIGHT REASONABLY BE EXPECTED to be associated with the ability to hear differences that people with inferior hearing acuity are unable to hear. I don't know whether it will turn out that way or not, but I am not prepared to claim that it won't without actually testing it. And, yes, it absolutely makes sense to be sure to include test subjects from EVERY demographic that REASONABLY MIGHT show a preferential result.... and that includes men and women, of a variety of ages, and a variety of ethnic and genetic backgrounds, with a variety of listening skills.
Again, as has been pointed out repeatedly, this thread is NOT intended to be about marketing, or about audiophile purchasing habits, but about pure science.
This has been stated repeatedly at various points in the discussion.
1. Here we go again, round and round, making up fallacies, ignoring the facts, etc! Accused of confusing hearing acuity with listening skills, you respond by confusing hearing acuity with listening skills, impressive! Sure, when we're young some of our absolute hearing thresholds are superior and then gradually deteriorate with age, high frequency response being an obvious example. However, listening skills are pretty much the exact opposite, they improve with time, experience/age, training and practise. And again, there's a massive collection of test results to back that up and the only people who "question it's accuracy" are a tiny number of deluded audiophiles, who've presumably never experienced any listening skills training. So, if we want to test whether humans can listen for and identify differences between two different things, how does it "make obvious sense" to choose our test subjects from among the human demographic we already know has the worst listening skills? Your "makes obvious sense" is in fact the exact opposite, it couldn't make less sense ... Welcome everyone to the world of audiophile marketing!!
Your argument makes no sense on a completely different level either! Even if it were only about absolute hearing thresholds (rather than listening skills) and therefore a positive result could be obtained from very young children, how many of the audiophiles here on head-fi (or anywhere else) are at kindergarten? And, to whom are you marketing your amps, adults or young children? Maybe you assume that we here and/or your potential customers have the knowledge and critical thinking ability of a young child, maybe it's just you who have the critical thinking ability of a young child or maybe you're just trolling us again? Either way, here on this sub-forum, you're posts are insulting!
2. You've certainly expanded the limits of my knowledge. For example: The lengths to which someone trying to sell audiophile products is willing to go, a whole bunch of new fallacies, obfuscations, misrepresentations and BS and how to insult everyone's intelligence while avoiding contravening the terms of service. Err ... thanks?
G