DO CABLES REALLY MATTER?

Sorry Prof, I might have missed that you weren’t an engineer. I’m still catching up on who’s who. Your statement is actually quite logical. It would seem that one cannot reproduce sound that is objectively more accurate than the source. I think that might bring my observation more into the forefront then...   we’re actually chasing what sounds good to us and not what is necessarily the most accurate.  I think we might be able to agree that different metals or construction techniques might offer a different sound, and that sound might be more or less pleasant to an individual listener in a given system. However, I’m no engineer either, so I could be wrong. 

An EE cannot tell you what you hear.

Very true. I am of the opinion that if you’re enjoying what you hear then you’re doing it right, whether you’re listening through bent coat hanger or million dollar depleted uranium balanced cables. 
It does make conversations like this difficult though, because enjoyment is subjective, so people look for objectivity in measurements. If those don’t exist to support an opinion, then it may be “right” to the person hearing it, and wrong to the data driven types. 
For myself, I’ll keep tweaking my system and hopefully enjoying the results. 

rja,
Someone with the relevant expertise in EE could certainly predict to a significant degree what you hear. People in audio do it all the time. In my work in post production sound, if I couldn’t predict what you hear my job would be impossible (given I am manipulating sound all day long).

Further, the more you know about sound technology, be it the effects of manipulating various frequencies, what speaker measurements mean, what cable measurements mean, etc, the more you can predict what *you* will hear.

(I’ve known some amazing mixers who often blew me away at how accurately they identified frequency deviations - and knew exactly what things would sound like with a tweak of a dial).

And remember that audio equipment manufacturers, for instance speaker designers, clearly have knowledge about what technical parameters relate to which subjective effects. If they didn’t, they’d all be thrashing around in the dark, and experience, knowledge and expertise would count for nothing. Any decent speaker designer, for instance, would know what to tweak in their crossover design/drivers that will predictably produce, say, a more forward or deeper more recessed soundstage, etc.

Yes, the photograph analogy is good. No one as far as I know in music or film claims that they can improve upon the original recording. This is why the provenance of the recording is so important in remastering. The earlier the copy, the better.

What they can do is to manipulate the original so that it looks/ sounds different. And that’s exactly all what some cables do.