Cables that measure the same but (seem?) to sound different

This all reminds me of Japan trying to corner the premier wine market back in the 80's. Well they were good at everything else, it is after all just more engineering, right? They have the soil, they have the climate, they are the same latitude as all the best wine growing regions, how hard could it be?  

So they tested the crap out of the very best wines. Spectroscopy, gas chromatography, taste, smell, appearance, the works. All the very best wines, we are just gonna reverse engineer copy the crap out of em and beat em at their own game. Poured millions, hundreds of millions into it, and this is back in the 80's when a million was a big number not less than a rounding factor like today.   

Ten years later instead of leading the market they were sucking wind. Twenty years later they still had nothing to show for it but a lot of good looking numbers. Here we are now coming up on 40 years, what we call two generations and look around, it is all California, France, Spain, same old.   

They did the double blind science thing too. Turns out only people who actually have a taste for wine are fit to judge wine. Ultimately it does no good to insist on engineering and scientific testing. Either the people are buying it, or the people are not buying it. 

Far as I know they never did figure out how to test and engineer wine. Change one letter. What are the odds it will be any different with wire?

The idea of "social construction" gets a lot of bad press these days but, as hilde45's example of a monetary currency shows, "real" things with "real" consequences can still be matters of social construction. The placebo effect is also real, at least insofar as the belief that a drug (for instance) will have an effect often can produce that effect. It's a common misunderstanding to suppose that this means the effect is NOT "real," but rather "all in the head." It is in the head that "reality" is experienced, after all! What's particularly fascinating to me is the extent to which certain theories in quantum physics seem to imply that consciousness is genuinely constitutive of the "external" or so-called real world. "Objectivity" and "subjectivity" are not nearly so easily distinguished as we like to think. But that's a topic far beyond the scope of an audiophile forum.

@snilf  Spot on. The terms "objectivity" and "subjectivity" and the hard dualism dividing mind and world are the root of a lot of mistakes in audio and other areas, but it's no simple matter to unpack and defuse those mistaken summations of what exists. The simplest way for me is to think of everything as process, involved in an interactive (or ecological) system. This way of thinking doesn't get rid of categories like "mind" or "matter" but it converts them into rough placeholders, sticky notes for present purposes but discardable as soon as the purposes of inquiry change.

Where people get lost in the woods is easily seen in this thread. As I mentioned before measurements of equipment can't explain the human perception of music. Think of it as a two systems,  when sound hits the ear our system of perception from ear to brain is in control. We decide what we like and don't,  it's the system of subjective preferences. The system of mechanical reproduction of sound is objective as it's ruled by electricity, mathematics, electronics, circuits etc.. which we construct. Some audiophiles like to merge these two realities as if they're one system. Since we can't  "yet" measure our perceptions then we can't measure our equipment good enough because they don't  always align and obviously our perception system  is better than the mechanical system. Any test these engineers design can't be accurate because the test doesn't always agree with what I believe. Science can measure music reproduction systems better than our ears, they can design tests that tell us if what we hear is a difference in the mechanical system or a preference of our subjective system. There's nothing right or wrong about preferring one cable or speaker, amp, etc.. than another. Claiming that equipment that measures the same doesn't sound the same offering only anecdotes as proof doesn't get us anywhere or teach us anything besides everyone has an opinion.  If done with properly controlled testing then we have something to go on. The only way social constructs work is if we all agree on the rules, natural physical phenomena is oblivious to our rules, under the right conditions electricity will stop your heart whether we believe or not. 

Measurements have little relation to sound quality.