Actually there is about a 1.8% variance between Chimp DNA and human and certainly the morphological and mental differences between chimps and homo sapiens sapiens is enormous. I was being facetious, and thought about using the chimp/human DNA conformance as an example, but I thought that would really offend the knuckle walkers.
BTW, nice to hear from you Chess. I'm still laughing at your demonstration of graceless bad manners.
BTW, I still have one case remaining of 1990 and one of 1993 Chateau Margaux. On the other hand, two buck chuck is fine for dressing roasts.
The problem here is that those who know it all base their rigid opinions on the assumption that a cable's performance is reduceable to 3 electrical parameters: resistance, inductance, and capacitance. This is an idealization - a great over simplification.
Now Kcarlisle has already pointed out that cables do make a difference in sound quality. When you connect a speaker wire to a speaker, the speaker's impedance is in series with that of the speaker wire, therefore, speaker wire can actually modify the speaker's frequency response. So, setting aside his snotty concession, we see that even a reductionist agrees that speaker wire makes a difference in sound quality. But, it does not stop there.
Dick Olsher has done some thinking (and listening) on the subject:
In reply to:
"Put a gun to their head, and they will maintain till their dying breath that the RLC paradigm is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the past ten years, a handful of investigators have shown that the RLC paradigm just doesn't go far enough, and that there are other factors that do indeed affect signal transmission. This is also true for other passive parts such as caps and resistors where a simplistic test-bench measurement oriented paradigm has failed to fully account for sonic differences. Turn a Meter Head loose with an Audio Precision System and have him try to differentiate between a mass-market receiver and a Mark Levinson, or for that matter, between a run of #16 awg zip cord and an equal length of high-end cable. It's like trying to judge fine wines on the basis of a chemical analysis. Such measurements are in general not predictive of human perceptions.
To paraphrase Rene Descartes, I hear, therefore I am. Meaning, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. While it is possible to dissect a sound field with a variety of frequency and time domain measurements, these meter readings or waterfall plots in no way add up to reflect the emotional reaction I might experience. No wonder science has had such a hard time defining perceptual attributes. Take timbre, for example. The American National Standards Institute defines timbre as "that attribute of a tone by which a listener can judge that two sounds of the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar." Pretty vague if you ask me. The following layman's definition is no better: the perceivable difference between a clarinet middle C and a violin middle C is timbre. To quote Handel (Listening: An Introduction to the Perception of Auditory Events: MIT Press), "timbre is not reducible to an acoustical property that automatically yields a clarinet note or a violin note."
Timber has to be judged subjectively."
Anyway, among other things, what I find interesting is the reaction of folks who KNOW that cables make no difference to sound quality to the suggestion that folks simply listen! Would you not agree that the responses to the suggestion range from displaced behavior (let's talk about wine) to outright hostility?
Isn't it interesting that we have here a subject about which reasonable people cannot even begin a discussion much less concede to those who say they can hear a difference that the objectors will at least give it a listen?
I think it's interesting, and in the case of aggressive dull normals like Chess, funny.
