Hey Chess,
I hope your papers go along well! It's tough to argue with a man who likes Guinness, so I'll try to make this brief.
The intention of the cold fusion researchers was to recreate the process. One "successful" experiment leads to the hope that it can be reproduced. If it cannot be done, then the reason is typically pinned down to a particular mistake in the original experiment, or to outright fraud.
This is not the case with audio cables. Cable skeptics dismiss all the witnesses' claims because "they wanted to hear it." Audio cables were never claimed to be the silver bullet, the cold fusion, of the audio world, so there's no way to contradict it with experiments. It's simply too well-established in most audiophile circles, contentious though it may be, to be dismissed so easily.
True snake-oil products tend to disappear after awhile, especially on the high end. After all, do you really think people enjoy spending thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars on audio equipment if they aren't getting a real benefit? And there are satisfied audiophiles going on for decades now. I think the main issue here is that people tend to see expensive products as absurd when they can't afford them. There are plenty of cars that will out-accelerate a Ferrari for a fraction of the price, but so what? What about how it sounds when you start up a V12, what about how the leather feels against your skin, what about how it feels to grip the wheel through a decreasing-radius on ramp while easing on the throttle? Quantify that.
In the meantime I will try to find more objective information online for you non-believers. Here's an interesting, though not terribly well-written, article about cable theory posted by some audio dealer:
cable theory
-Cooper
