Kenneth - There is always a loss of quality, proportional to distance, no matter what type of cable. How pronounced it is depends on the quality of the cable and your perception. I bought my cable short 0.5m "just in case" and never tried 3m one. From what I read a lot of people use even longer than 3m interconnect with very good results. A lot depends on the quality of the cable. Inductance and skin effect are not important here but capacitance and dielectric constant are. Between the cables dielectric constant changes two-fold (1.5-3) and capacitance 10-fold (3pF/ft-30pF/ft). Purity of the metal plays part as well. There is no scientific proof of anything related to cables and some people believe that terminated 100 ft cable from Radio Shack is absolutely perfect.
