Never heard a difference.
As to the horrifying influence of speaker cables touching things: I moved from a variety of speaker cables when my source components were in the same room as my speakers, to moving my source components to another room. This required a 35 foot run of 10awg speaker cable, run down along ceiling, under floor, snaking through shag rug to speaker. No sonic difference detectable at all. Sounds exactly as detailed, pure...all the nice descriptors....as before. That's just my own anecdotal evidence, though.
If all this "cables can't go touching things (what's that shielding for again?) stuff were true, the home theater realm would be suffering terribly, since even in the highest-end installs you have cables running through walls etc. And yet state of the art sound is often achieved this way. Aside from generally well-known cautions about how to choose and install cables (e.g. you want to avoid many cables running in parallel to power lines etc), this hand-wringing about "I can't let my cables touch things" is mostly reserved for the subjectivist audiophile world, and those selling products to them.
Of course, if you are in the "if I do X to my system and think I hear a difference it's true" camp, many people will "hear" a difference in virtually any suggested tweak. So it's up to you what type of "evidence" is sufficient.
As to the horrifying influence of speaker cables touching things: I moved from a variety of speaker cables when my source components were in the same room as my speakers, to moving my source components to another room. This required a 35 foot run of 10awg speaker cable, run down along ceiling, under floor, snaking through shag rug to speaker. No sonic difference detectable at all. Sounds exactly as detailed, pure...all the nice descriptors....as before. That's just my own anecdotal evidence, though.
If all this "cables can't go touching things (what's that shielding for again?) stuff were true, the home theater realm would be suffering terribly, since even in the highest-end installs you have cables running through walls etc. And yet state of the art sound is often achieved this way. Aside from generally well-known cautions about how to choose and install cables (e.g. you want to avoid many cables running in parallel to power lines etc), this hand-wringing about "I can't let my cables touch things" is mostly reserved for the subjectivist audiophile world, and those selling products to them.
Of course, if you are in the "if I do X to my system and think I hear a difference it's true" camp, many people will "hear" a difference in virtually any suggested tweak. So it's up to you what type of "evidence" is sufficient.