How can we hear the difference in cables in a bad room?

Here's a really good way to show what I'm talking about. Take a recording of people talking in a room, or just of your system playing music.

Then listen on head phones. Magically, you hear all the room acoustics for the first time, and once you practice, you can learn to hear it in the room in real time.

What this shows to me is that we do hear those room acoustics, but our brain is actively routing them into the trash for us.

I think the answer is that our brain spends a LOT of time and effort filtering out room acoustics.

Well, no. No way. 

I mean, a lot of time? So think about it. Please. For like ten seconds.

Proto-human hears slithering snake about to strike. But the photo-human brain has to spend a lot of time filtering out cave acoustics, vs tree limb acoustics, vs... BAM! Snake bite. No more photo-human. Hey! You! Out of the gene pool!!

Not to mention every speaker, amp, wire, and component ever made sounds nothing like the real thing. Every single one of em brings its own full menu of distortions, omissions, and artifacts to the game. If our brains had to spend any time at all filtering out all these differences we'd never even begin to be able to enjoy listening to music. Wouldn't even be music, at least not as far as our overburdened brains were concerned. It'd all be indecipherable noise.

Whatever it is and however its done the one thing we can be sure of is its lightening fast. Or at least faster than a snake.

I encourage everyone who is interested to actually do some research instead of knee-jerk responding to a topic brand new to them.

Best,
E

Erik, +1.

It is no different from other sensory fields. You can read a book just fine under the imperceptibly flickering light, as your eye works hard to position for the text you want to read, while the flickering causes it to overshoot and undershoot position, placing extra burden on image processing, and on the extraocular muscles, leading to early fatigue, and for some people, headaches.

To the op, whether one believes cables make a difference or not, what you would be "detecting" is a difference. That does not mean you have made your system good, just different. Better of course does not mean good. I think you can use your own judgment on whether many of the audio adjectives and effects assigned to a particular cable type are viable.

Miller, you may get more traction with your posts if you didn’t start them by extolling your personal perfection while insulting everyone else. To be honest, after this paragraph, I didn’t read anything else in that post:

While the rest are enjoying arguing about why I’m enjoying sounds they can only dream of. Actually maybe not even dream. If their imagination is as stifled as their intellect that would stand to reason.

Here are a couple of books I like. Robert Harley’s "The Complete Guild to High-End Audio" fifth edition.

Highly recommended!