Cooper,
Some interesting points you bring up. However, these sorts of posts are invitation for everybody's $0.02, so...
A lot of the people posting on this board are scientists of one form or another, such as engineers and doctors. As such, they (we...I'm one myself) have a predisposition to favor hard science over subjective descriptions we might consider "flights of fancy". It's the deeply entrenched skepticism of scientific/philosophical inquiry, and if you've thought that way for 30 years, it's pretty darn hard to change your approach to things. And heck...if speaker design can be described in measurable numbers a-la the NRC curves, a scientist is drawn like a horse to water.
So what happens when reviewers name a power cable product of the year, despite no statistically measurable difference? The scientist dismisses it...at best, it's expectation bias, at worst it's sheer nonsese.
Much as I love watching 2x6spds raise the wrath of Semi and Chesseroo by claiming megabuck speaker wire makes a difference, the truth is there's nothing wrong with believing in the subjective. It's just that with us fuddy-duddy scientists, it'll never happen until that p-value hits less than 0.05
