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).
