In the post you replied to I explicitly wrote:
Much to my surprise, your (provocatively brief?) response to this was:
Against this background, I must confess I was “terribly” 
disappointed (only kidding!) when you suggested the following test method:
Quite obviously, this is NOT a listening test. Of course, I quite agree with you that your informal experiment would be fairly easy to carry out, and I also would expect the same results as you (i.e. nearly identical analog output measurements). However, I couldn’t disagree more with your statement that
As I pointed out in two earlier posts, I’m fully aware that (informal/private) listening tests “always have to be regarded with a healthy dose of scepticism” and that “anyone can fall prey to” what I called the “powerful effect of preconceived notions” (see above). Yet at the same time there can be no doubt that – together with the most accurate/precise measurements possible — carefully/scientifically conducted listening tests are an indispensable (additional) tool in this particular field of research (even though they can be extremely difficult to construct and perform). Any kind of ‘either/or’ thinking is clearly counterproductive in this context. In fact, it appears to me that the often-heard assumption that “if you can’t measure it, then it doesn’t exist” is (almost, but not quite 
) as naive and unscientific as the quasi-religious belief of a small minority of self-proclaimed audiophile “experts” who seem to think that the world of HiFi does not follow the laws of physics and that their “golden ears” render any measurements superfluous.