As a long-time audiophile (getting close to 40 years since the hobby bit me...), it intrigues me that the debate over so many aspects of the subjective elements of our hobby still rage on. (When I belonged to the Pacific NW Audio Society in the mid-1980's, we actually had a program one evening to listen to the differences in sound caused by capacitors...)
There are not a lot of safe things that one can say about the effects (or lack thereof) of speaker cables, interconnects, the type of materials used in capacitors or wiring, etc., etc., without stimulating debate. Nevertheless, I must say that many of the comments in the article on Webjump have validity. I have sold audio gear professionally, and listened to a ton of equipment (most of it when my hearing was better), and know from personal experience how easy it is to mislead customers. I think the most relevant paragraph in the entire article is this one:
"...The ear (and attached brain) is easily fooled, and has a very short memory for what you hear. Speakers can have huge anomalies in response, and within a few minutes the brain has made the necessary adjustments, and everything will seem to sound as it should."
Over the past 40 years, there has been a lot of scientific study of psycho-acoustics (my college undergrad major was physiological psychology), and the one constant that plagues all research related to what we hear is the ability of the brain to accomodate to changing information. Think of the sense of smell, for example: if an odor is present for more than a minute or so, your olfactory awareness decreases (a real-world example occurs every time you camp on the toilet...).
One of the more interesting categories of experiments done to study the brain's ability to adjust involve sight. As an undergrad, I was a participant in an experiment that involved wearing a special set of lenses that reverse images -- so left seems to be right, and everything seems upside down. The participants were required to wear the lenses for a week without taking them off. By the end of the 4th or 5th day of wearing the lenses, most of us in the experiment had accommodated to the complete reversal of our visual fields of reference.
A phenomenon of the human brain is that we attend to external stimuli in ways that relate to what is important to us. The specific mechanism in the human brain that controls this awareness level is the reticular activating system. This physiological system sets the "threshhold" at which we notice external stimuli -- such as a baby crying at night. Typically, mothers are much more tuned to the sounds of a baby crying than the father (no attacks, please, this is a non-sexist generalization). Even a few faint cries are often enough to wake up the mother, while the father snores on (for verification, ask a sample of new mothers...).
With audio gear, we acclimate to what our own sound system sounds like, and it becomes the norm. Given the brain's ability to accommodate and "re-program" itself, all audiophiles should maintain a healthy degree of skepticism about what they perceive as changes. If you have a high expectation that cable "A" will sound different than cable "B", the chances are very good that you will hear a difference.
I am neither defending nor supporting the points presented in the article. I believe that I can hear differences between amplifiers, for example, and my spouse can also (for example, we both noticed more detail, transparency, and dynamics when we upgraded the main power amp last year).
I am much less sure that differences in cables, materials, etc., are acoustically discernable in a valid test. People may THINK they are hearing a difference, but if you have paid $2500 or more for a set of interconnects or speaker wires, you will damn sure WANT to hear an improvement.
So, let the debate rage on ... that's one reason why audiophilia is such a great hobby.
