Who says cables don't make a difference?

Speedbump, there’s plenty of objective evidence supporting the other point of view but, certainly it’s possible that there are things we simply cannot measure yet. So...as I said, if your perception is that one cable sounds better to your ear than another, by all means buy it.

But until we have the ability to prove otherwise, the fact is that your position that one can "hear the difference" is fundamentally where this position starts and ends. Pages of elaborate rhetoric may be persuasive to some, without supporting scientifically verifiable evidence, the argument that someone can "hear the difference" can easily be chalked up to confirmation and other cognitive biases (these biases are the issue, and are not consider "hallucination" btw).  

Right. Exactly. We can hear the difference. Period. Why you then go on and on with all that rhetoric about objectivity and measurements is beyond me. Surely you see how it only weakens your case?

Actually, you think you can hear the difference, but that doesn’t mean there’s actually a difference. Many psychological studies have investigated this.  So, no, it doesn't weaken my case at all.  You could perhaps think of it like a placebo effect. For example, there have been studies with wine tasting that people who are blind tasting will score a wine higher if they are told it is expensive, and lower if they are told it is inexpensive. Yet in both cases they were tasting the same wine.

In short, the imperative is for those claiming that they can hear a difference (based on cabling) to actually be able to prove there is a difference... such as through instrumentation that can measure that difference or by being able to consistently identify the the supposed higher quality cabling in a blind test.

Speed, I’m quite familiar with the work psychologists have done on these sorts of things. In fact, I just used a simple example above with wine tasting where similar testing has been done blind. There are tests with many other subjects as well, and is clearly generalizable to this particular scenario.

My point quite simply is that psychological testing has already proven that your assertion that "is a not insignificant number of people who can hear differences" doesn’t mean a damn thing if you cannot demonstrate that there is a scientifically provable difference. It’s essentially a form of confirmation bias. People expect something that is more expensive to be better, and lots of tests have been done that prove this occurs in a wide range of areas. Certainly audio equipment and audiophiles aren’t immune (if anything we’re highly likely to be subject to these biases).

Industries for years have grown up around this, so that too isn’t a meaningful statement. Marketing expressly leverages this to convince people to pay more for designer brands. The difference being that how something looks, feels, etc, is entirely subjective... whereas there are scientific ways to assess current passing through a cable to produce sound.

I like cars, and I’m happy to buy a car that produces an emotional response, is fun to drive, etc. So, like I said, if you want to pay more for a cable because you THINK it sounds better, knock yourself out. But you’ve got exactly zero evidence that proves it’s anything other than what I stated above.  Meanwhile I've got quite a bit of evidence that strongly suggests it is what I'm arguing (though it's entirely possible it could be proven wrong at some point).

For giggles I read through 6 pages of this thread (slightly more than halfway).  After that six pages I really saw only two posters who could competently describe / explain the physics of electricity and electrical engineering:  roberttdid and georgemgraves.  Everything else was simply empty rhetoric.  

Are there any posts from someone else on pages 7-11 that fall into the realm of actual informed knowledge (versus empty rhetoric) that would justify reading further?

Thanks djones51... that's what I thought.  I've got no problem with someone asserting that they subjectively perceive a difference and are happy to pay thousands of $ for it, but certainly we don't need pages and pages of that noise if there's no way they can objectively back it up.