What are we objectivists missing?

First of all, we are not listening to a cable, we are listening to a system, our system, which most people here know the sound of intimately.

Here's a test:  How about you record your system playing real music at say 1 meter using "perfect" microphones direct into a "perfect" ADC. Switch cables and repeat. This is a thought experiment so I can say "perfect".

Compare the two digital files to see if there are any differences. Possibly incorporate AI "deep learning" to discover over time what that difference sounds like.

Just sayin'.

Regards,

barts 

A prime example of this matter is tube amps vs solid state ones or what some called glass vs sand amps. Compare a good tube amp’s specs, distortion, damping factor,  actual power out put, square wave accuracy etc. vs. most class D amps, all receivers, & most moderately priced solid state amps. On paper the tube amp might seem to be much less accurate & less faithful to the music. In reality, the reverse is more likely true. 
 

if this doesn’t show in the measurements, perhaps not all the right things were measured & I’ll bet we don’t really know exactly what they all are. Our brain & senses are very complex & amazing things w/ almost an infinite level of potential detail. 

Playing golf recently I won a ball for longest drive, it caused great debate, was it red or orange? About 50% of other golfers round the table said each colour, you cannot tell someone what they see and you cannot tell someone what they hear.

If a device or cable or whatever measures exactly the same it should sound exactly the same. So what are your opinions on what those differences might be and what are we NOT measuring that would define those differences?

Dark Matter, Dark Energy & the Higgs Boson (God Particle) and its interaction with said cable or tweak? Since it makes up 96% of the universe and we know literally nothing about it except its presence, it very well may be the missing factor. But the pride of man probably won’t allow it to be considered due to its ramifications

I'll give you guys a mystery of my own.  I got into upgrading speakers for a little while and the results were fun and educational.

I used a DATS V2 to measure replacement parts.  I believe Focals use Solen as their OEM and IMHO it shows.  I really prefer the sound of the almost as inexpensive Mundorf MKPs instead.  Anyway, I replaced the tweeter caps after measuring the original and new caps for capacitance and equivalent series resistance (ESR).  Both were very very similar.

For about 4 days after replacement I kept hearing weird surround sound effects.  I would hear sounds from the recording appear to happen below and behind me.  Later on this cleared up and never happened again.  The resulting sound was less harsh and more mellow than the original caps.

The weird sound effects I have always chalked up to head related transfer function (HRTF) effects.  The idea that the right comb filtering can make us hear things happen in 3D space.

HRTF effects are complicated.  If I wanted to measure or prove/disprove this was happening I'd need to have recorded the sound and compared the frequency response and phase responses of the before and after.  If that measured the same I'd chalk it up to my hearing, but to this day I think HRTF would explain what I heard and capacitor break-in behavior a lot more than uF and ESR.