P - Bring it on! I can demonstrate how insulation bleeds random energy into the signal sounding like white noise. I can place any preamp you care to champion with the one I have, and watch the dynamics and stage collapse. Give me your best oversampling CD player and see how poorly it reacts. This is not my fault. It is my findings of what works and doesn't work with my ICE amps.
I don't use CD players or speaker cables, so I won't be of much use in the competition. But while I do believe in the pervasive power of expectation bias, I don't believe in magic. I'm sorry Muralman, but what I believe is that if your system responds as dramatically as you say it does to the kinds of changes you describe, there is something systematically wrong.
YMMV and all of that.
P