Experience up-leveling streaming with USB cables?

@soix ​​​​​​  I don't know if there is any validity to it, but some seem to think there is.  I bought the cable used when I got my streamer and it happened to be 1.5M. 

My I2s cable is only 0.5M.  I picked up a new one from Wyred 4 Sound.  On sale for $99.

@bluethinker: I am sorry to be the one muddying the waters, but... it’s not that simple IME.

1. Price and reputation can be misleading sometimes. Synergy and personal preference, on the other hand, do play a huge role. I have pretty good gear, not very high end but pretty decent (Accuphase CD/SACD player / Dac, Accuphase integrated, Spendor and soon to come Graham speakers) and I have tried the following USB cables in my system: FTA Sinope (1m, great reviews), Charlin something (1m, it was about 700 euro retail a couple of years ago or so), Curious (1m and 2m, great reviews), Supra Excalibur (1m), Supra (1m and 2m, still have them both), LH Labs Lightspeed (1m), something from iFi with power and signal separated and 2 A-type connectors (1m or smaller), something from Kimber (1m, silver plated copper I think, about 5-600 euro retail iirc) and I think also a DH Labs Mirage (1m). And the winner was... to my ears and in my system... the cheapest Supra (2m)! Believe it or not! I could tell a very similar story regarding the power cables, btw. I’m not saying Supra is "objectively" better, it was overall preferable to me. I’d love to try others though: Sablon, Transparent, maybe even the ubiquitous Audioquest Diamond.

2. Length does matter in USB cables. When I compared the 1m to the 2m versions of Supra and Curious, in both cases I preferred the longer cable: stronger, punchier bass and more assertive treble, better authority overall. The short cable was definitely more midrange centric and might have had a more complete (as in not simplified) rendition of cymbals, but I’m not sure anymore. In a different system, a different cable could result in a different conclusion. The 1.5 meter minimum lenght is a recommendation of Steve Nugent of Empirical Audio if I’m not mistaken and is not about the USB cables, it’s about the coaxial SPDIF cables. Something about the imperfect impedance matching resulting in reflections that travel back and forth along the wire and arrive at the receiver a short while after the initial impulse. If the delta t is too small, i.e. the cable is too short, the receiver gets confused.

@bluethinker 

I will put the Wireworld Platinum Starlight 8 USB up against any cable regardless of price. If out of your budget, the inakustik Reference USB is a killer. Both are organic-sounding cables with jaw-dropping realism.