well... one can't "play" scientist... one can play "mock scientist", which most of these type of threads seem to do...
if one wants to introduce "science" into the equation, it DOES get a bit stickier in terms of "proof"... especially when "observation" is contrary to accepted scientific theory (which, again, most of these threads seem to be)...
@nuance (if you are reading)... what avsforum poster IMMEDIATELY came to mind when seeing the picture that charles xavier posted? 
Hehe, yes well then let's call it amateur scientist rather than mock scientist. And it used to be that the word amateur had a much better connotation that it does now.
There is a book out fairly recently that investigated the batting average of professional scientists in varied disciplines as they published their findings in reputable journals. The shocking result is that time showed the the *majority* to be *wrong* in their conclusions.
There are a number of reasons for this. But one thing to be learned is that science must become less dogmatic. Findings are always relative to the peculiar context of the experiment, and one must be careful not to generalize or worse, to extrapolate findings to the level of absolute truth.
I'm an empiricist at heart. Theory is nice even indispensable as a guideline of course, but it really should be considered incomplete and expandable as more experiments are done.
The best experiments leave little room for a wrong conclusion even though the scope of that conclusion might be limited. For instance Mike's audio setup has its peculiarities as do all of ours. So he can't generalize. But it would be easy for him to do a blind study where he (supposedly) would be able to repeatably discern (to say 95 percent confidence) which jumper configuration makes the best sound to him. Audio dogmatists may protest, but they simply can't refute the experiment within it's limited context.
What theorists should do is take findings like this
at face value and probe deeper into the phenomenon. For instance, why can't everybody hear cable differences in their systems? Why exactly does some equipment seem more transparent to differences in cable? And so on.
That there are still unknowns to probe in this field makes it all the more fun!
Mark
