DO CABLES REALLY MATTER?

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.

There's been a lot of discussion about recording on past threads with recording engineers already weighing in on this topic. Some say it's all bunk and some say otherwise. Some even say that when budget allows, some studios opt for better cables than originally used. 

There was even a link that showed where one studio went with Nordost cables and were impressed with the improvement. But all of that can be discounted as some kind of quid pro quo, couldn't it?

I don't know how many times this topic can come up but it will continue to do so as long as some here have an axe to grind.

All the best,
Nonoise

It will. Some have an axe to grind. There are those of us that know that they make a difference based on the ability of your system to be resolving and transparent