I really think it’s in their head, if you just spend $5000 for two cables to hook up your speakers, you’ll think they make a difference because humans are inherently rational and have to justify spending that kind of money on something that doesn’t actually do anything. 99% of what they are buying is a good story, nice packaging, and a lot of thick ass cable sleeving with fancy carbon fiber ends on them. kind of like an apple product!
At least with apple you get what you pay for hardware wise (sometimes lol but it’s mostly the great simple, seamless user experience). I’m all for someone buying a sweet ass cable for headphones to have it be nice feeling and looking, and remove microphonics and lay flat and stuff like that, it’s like jewelry. But don’t buy it expecting some increase. I can understand if people hear a difference between a balanced cable, but you really shouldn’t be able to hear a difference between two good cables, unless you have the system I mentioned beforehand, then you might lol, but still very unlikely
Apple used to be the number one company that made me angry ($500 to double your ram!, oh btw its soldered to the motherboard!), but I think audio cable companies have surpass them for me because even if you way over pay for another 16gb of ram, at least your getting something that actually makes a difference if you need it, like if you want to run 16 you tube videos at 4k simultaneously!
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had a rgument with a guy once trying to convince me the his $400 usb 2.0 cable makes a difference. because it’s japanese made and made with the finest materials and he AB lind tested them himself and his family and claim to hear a difference. same guy made fu of anothe audiophile for spending 2 grand on a DAC because " he is smart enough to only spend a $100 on a dac" which was a khadas toneboard which hes was trying to convert from usb c to usb type B so he could plug in his $400 usb cable. dude also kept linking us all the data sheets that are provided by the company.
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lol. It’s like he wanted to make himself believe that cables matter and dacs don’t so he doesn’t blow money on things that actually bring an upgrade
like I would be less mad at a $400 speaker cable because there are measureable differences between quality of an analog cable as in very minor hard to hear and like a cheap shitty cable vs a nice solid cable.
I do think that a 25 buck usb cable is going to potentially be better then a 5 buck one, but really its a digital cable. Unless you have gear that’s super sensitive to ground loops or electrical noise, it’s not really worth thinking about a usb cable over 30 bucks
Also at least an analog cable won’t get outdated compared to a usb cable lol
i would say anything past the likes of an amazon prime usb cable is pointless.
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I would argue that getting something with better shielding might be helpful if you have a fair amount of interference, and if you are getting a usb cable over 8 feet imo you would need to get an active cable that might end up being pricy
Also I think high end cables as a whole are honestly like insurance or something, where you are getting them to make sure the cables are never the bottleneck in your system or something like that (or that’s what I think people who buy expensive cables do it for lol)
i guess my setup is pretty well shielded and I do have a pretty modern computer so it isn’t exactly electrically noisy as most computers and I live in a house built in the last 20 years so it’s pretty well grounded and electrically sound. so I really don’t notice any diffrences between digital cables. so I could be in a unique situation or just my gear which is somewhat entry level : topping d10, Liquid spark, 58x, 990 just not good enough to pick shit up.or frankly I’m too distracted enjoying music or playing video games ,
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Na, it’s probably not a problem. But I do know some high end dacs can be very sensitive to electrical noise and need a cable with some sort of ground loop isolator or really good shielding. But yeah I would only say you would be able to tell the difference between analog cables with a crazy high end system (or with cables that modify the sound on purpose lol). Overall just not worth investing into high end cables imo
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I don’t doubt that expensive cables can sound different. Impedance, inductance, noise isolation, etc. can make a difference. Especially in a highly resolving system. The real question is: do they sound better. That’s purely subjective. Unless you do a blind A/B test I’m confident almost everyone will prefer the more expensive one - it costs so much more and there was a bunch of research so it must be better.
But ultimately the problem is that none us of knows what the live band sounded like in the studio. So we have ZERO reference about what it’s supposed to sound like. Therefore even a highly rated and loved amp (for example) may turn out to be complete garbage if you were able to compare its “sound” directly against the performer in the studio.
In the end, everything is a tweak to get you closer to the sound signature YOU prefer. In which case, it doesn’t matter what gear you get - go cheap! Throw a nice eq in the chain and tweak away 
I’m being extreme up here ^^^ just to make a point.
Just about any cable past Amazon basics is fucking useless, they make really nice cables for cheap, got everything I needed with banana plugs and 200ft of 99.9% oxygen free in wall speaker cable for under $100.
Digital cables work or they don’t, their is no in-between, Amazon basics has everything you need!
Well, sometimes I get to watch some of the audio I master record lol. So sometimes I do get to listen to them live while recording and then go back and do the master (but not very often since I really don’t master music that often, mainly other stuff)
You’re in the tiny minority then. The rest of us are winging it lol
Yeah, and even then is pretty rare that I even do mastering related to music anyway, since it’s mostly for more business/corporation oriented things. But sometimes I do go listen to some friends studios and get to listen to their recording sessions which is neat
What makes me frustrated with these and other boutique cottage industry artisan stuff is that they often make regular priced stuff like a digital coax cable that has an rca type connector on one end and a bnc connector on the other exceedingly difficult to find because like a million boutique sellers are making them for 500 to 6000 dollars a piece.
Just get a full on bnc cable, and then get a bnc to rca adapter, as the bnc to rca adapters are pretty cheap
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Yeah. I ultimately did order a bnc cable and an adapter (I was trying to hook a bluray player to my dac) but it took me a while to figure that out as all my searches flooded me with audiophile snake oil stuff.
I’m so glad I found this forum. The number of places that push the audiophile cable nonsense is incredible
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