Too Much Time On Their Hands

Reminds me of the guy who used lengths of twisted aluminium foil instead of speaker cable. Blind test showed that some listeners actually prefered the sound of the foil. 

A "decent" conductor is surprisingly easy to achieve for 99.9% of conductivity applications, even with short runs of seemingly silly materials spliced in (i.e. an electrolyte solution in various guises meant for "shock" effect). That’s what this study proves. You can’t prove or disprove connoisseur-level nuance with: 

• Random-ish audience with the "audiophile" label slapped on them (for science!)
• A test system unfamiliar / new to everyone there
• Basic copper wire at best - far from exotic or high-end. Same probably goes for all system components here. This kind of gear tops out at "it works". What’s the point? 
• Tedious / boring blind ABX tests to ensure any chance of deriving subjective musical pleasure during listening is ZERO.

A perfect clickbait study! That said, do we audiophiles also overplay the supposed "night and day" differences between cables? ABSOLUTELY. But silver sounds different than copper (even if only subtly, and for limited applications), and I’ll die on that hill. 

This study is the audiophile analogue of: "we left a McDonalds burger in a window sill for 5 years and it never changed! It must not be food!" - in reality it starts out dry and salty, and desiccates in climate-controlled conditions (which only existed in the last 70 years outside artic climates) before it can rot. Nothing is proven because the premise and setup is stupid. I despise people who author crap like this. 

@mulveling 

 This kind of gear tops out at "it works".

Yep. If a power cable properly delivers the 115 volt/ 15 amps coming out of your wall socket there can be NO further improvement no matter how much your cables cost. A cable can't make things sound better. It can make things sound worse if it's faulty or defective.

^ this @gdaddy1, Cable eccentricities can not "add" any benefits to a properly designed signal path.

Full Stop.