They often are...when compared sighted.
(And even then, you wrote on your site: "To everyone else expecting huge differences in sound: don´t be disappointed; while my descriptions are accurate you probably won´t hear anything when you give those files a first listen. There are two reasons for it: 1. you have to be experienced to hear those differences and 2. the differences between HiFi components are not that big once amplitude differences are removed (as is shown by comparing them to the original files)." So maybe they're not so 'apparent'? )
You´re correct. On my blog I address not only people like you who I assume to be experienced but also everyday people - and from my experience they often aren´t that attuned to hearing differences that may seem slight to them - and compared to an equalizer setting (which seems to be often used by "normal" people not having this hobby to tune sound to their liking) the differences are indeed small. Furthermore, you take things out of context (as it seems just for the sake of it or for discrediting me), the quote you mentionend comes from my article about portable CD players - I wrote this sentences to address the expectation bias: since audio magazines are often writing that huge differences between CD players exist and I claim otherwise I had to address that the differences are not so huge as many expect them they would be.
FYI, I often do comparisons two ways: sighted and with DBT. I did the same here on the USB cable differences. I´m planning a little article about DBTs where I plan to also address this.
