Does raising speaker cables off the floor really make a big difference?

Nothing beats prof post :-)

^^^^
Much obliged.  :)

I can't match prof word for word, since he already retires but I still have to earn money, so anyway, to save time, I plagiarize ... errrrr ... I mean paraphrase from a book.

In this book, there was a "real" story about a get together, or a convention, of a large group of well known scientists, or to be specific, a group of physicists specialized in the field of quantum physics.  Being a bit bored, they came up with a game that we all have one time or another played.  Basically, it's a game in which you can only get to ask "yes or no" question, and at the end you have to guess what it is.

Usually, for this game, everybody would agree first on an "object" so that people know to answer "yes or no" to the question being asked.  But being smart $$$ as they are, they want to make a slight change to the game to make it a bit interesting.  The change was at first, nobody would agree on any specific object, but whatever answer to the question asked thereafter has to be consistent with the previous answer.  So the second answer has to be consistent with the first answer, and the third answer has to be consistent with the second answer and so on.  So it goes that the first unlucky contestant after asking question after question, he noticed that it would take unusually longer and longer for the "yes or no" answer to come (as it would obviously since it gets harder and harder to be consistent after awhile), and also he could see some small laughter as if he was the object of a joke.  At the end, he was able to guess what the "object" was to the loud laughter of the entire room and of course he was let in on the joke finally.

Anyway, what does it have to do with cable risers?

I think prof already got me beat.  Maybe he can tell what that is.   

I keep telling you guys, any riser made of any material (ceramic, acrylic, wood, plastic, paper, etc.) that touches the floor, whether it's carpet, wood, tile, concrete, whatever, is not going to be as effective as suspending the cables from the ceiling.  It's the only way to go.  And a thin enough monofilament is virtually invisible.

prof
I love the sound of my CJ tube amplification and always go back to it after trying solid state. Never done a "blind test." Even when some "objectivists" think tube amps are silly. I swoon over the sound of my "crazy expensive" (to the average joe), cartridge etc. No talk of blind testing, all subjective.

>>>>Gosh, don’t go out on a limb or anything.

prof
I ALSO am aware of the general features of, and rational for, the scientific empirical method. And I can’t just pretend that audio is magically excepted from the complexities that bedevil any other careful empirical inquiry - especially the unreliability built in to human subjectivity.(And this is something the "blind test naysayers" seem to routinely misunderstand: accepting that human subjectivity is unreliable doesn’t mean "a subjective impression is wrong and due to bias" or "what you think you heard wasn’t real." It only means that in many cases it *could* be error, so it can be hard to unravel the objective facts from the subjective impressions).

>>>>Oh, geez, just when you were doing so well. Blind tests don’t mean anything. You were on the right track with complexities, but then you went off the rails with your usual bind test hornswoggle. It’s the inability of humans to control all the physical variables. Or know all the variables, for that matter. It has virtually nothing to do with psychological issues. No, it’s not hard to unravel the objective facts from the subjective hornswoggle.