in the defense of cables as variable on the sound, the arguement is often that the cable allows a more pure or accurate reproduction of the signal, its more "faithful to source" (as has been argued by everyone from new head-fi members to Monster themselves), so assume for a moment this is neccisarily true, that a variation in cables will create a variation in the accuracy of 1's and 0's being sent end to end, that errors will either be removed or created, and that this relationship exists for all forms of cabling (be it interconnects, or the internal wiring/traces of your components)
now, based on that, the "fixing" or "unfixing" of the signal is more or less "random chance" ("this cable improves high end clarity" vs "this cable give crazy bass and low end definition"), now consider all of the arguements about jitter, and how cables will improve that scenario, lets take ALL of it as true (even up to the most insane tweaks you wanna think of, tice clock and all), now that we've got our deck stacked up, lets then consider:
if all of this is true, and all of this
must apply, wouldn't the presentation be variable from instance to instance, in other words, playing back your music or movie or whatever in instance A will be a different presentation and sonic experience, "separate but identical" to instance B, or G, or F, and based on that reasoning (combined with some "textbook theory"), we can't actually say with any definitive proof "this is different" (as any attempt to recreate or measure the event, cannot be sure it is really measuring the event in question, are you simply witnessing the difference of the events, or some form of isolated change? and is the change going to be identical each time? (and if yes, how can this be, given that we're discussing entropic anamolies at the atomic level))
now based on that reasoning, you've got far too many variables and questions to definitively say "this must be", not to mention you're quite close to arguing "I KNOW THE POSITION OF AN ELECTRON"
the second approach assumes that the complexity of material science and engineering along with our understating of physics and electromagnetism ultimately make it impossible to answer the question
so in other words, you can either choose to accept the philosophy that cables make a difference, which accepts uncertainty theory as a postulate basis for "no proof", although they'll argue there is proof (but its illogical); or you can choose to accept the philosophy that there may or may not be a difference, although it would be generally imperceptable and variable from scenario to scenario, and ultimately not something which we can isolate or factually support
honestly, since there is no definitive, factual answer available (we can squabble all day over how to measure, but when it comes down to it, what are we actually looking for wrt measurements? frequency variation? amplitude? resistance? we can get all of those to "perfect" or "better than perfect" and differences are still claimed (i.e: does anyone believe that VD Judge vs VD Genesis is purely a matter of which one can conduct "more cleanly"?)), I would answer in the negative
