Red Alert 2 /// Mental Omega. Even my super slim laptop can play it and you can just jump in to a mission/campaign or skirmish anytime.

I’d be happy to be proven wrong - I haven’t been able to find anything that has studied or discounted it yet though!

Alright, this is the small, insignificant hill I’m prepared to die on.

Firstly, placebo is the wrong word - I’d argue it’s more of a perceptual phenomenon.

Why? Because we prioritise visual information over auditory information - we know this from the Mcgurk effect where hearing a word said over a video of a different word being said causes people to hear a different (third) word.

In this scenario all the ABX studies would show this had no effect on the audio, but we can clearly see from studies ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196040/ ) that what is perceived by people and what auditory information they are receiving can be different things.

This would mean that we could equate the ABX studies to be victims of looking for or measuring the wrong thing. The see visual information on the cables as a confounding variable, when in reality they should be considered as part of the dependent variable - with audio and visual data being seen as one/a whole.

Also, we know that 2 headphones can have the same/similar FR, but will/can sound different.

So, what we need is a blind or some kinds of ABX test where copper cables are put in either copper or silver sleeves and vice versa, not tell the participants and then see what the results are. I haven’t been able to find any studies on this, and until I do I won’t accept that cables don’t change a persons perception of how music sounds - and after all, perception is reality.