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

Wow I didn't know that.

There's already tools to explain differences they're ABX and Double Blind listening tests. If a difference is heard by enough people better than chance then science looks for why. So far differences that are heard have been explained by existing measurement at such time if they can't be then science will find a way to measure it. Good example is the Purifi Transducers. The designers heard things they couldn't measure or explain so they invented a way to measure what they heard. 

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.