What do audiophiles want from a cable?

Its a tweak to help fine tune  the sound when needed once all the common bigger issues are addressed. 

Sorry, don't use em. The best cable is no cable. Ditto power cords.

terry9, you can see the associated equipment on my system page.  It is resolving enough of an audio setup for cable differences to be audible and sometimes shockingly different.  It surprises me often the sonic attributes and shortcomings of difference cable.  

An inferior cable in the system will always change the presentation for the worst.  The words lifeless, unrefined, and uninvolving come to mind first when attempting to describe what happens to the system' presentation of the music with an inferior cable in place.  It loses the ability to do its best work.

Performance lost is performance lost period.  The presentation can be incorrect tonally, musical passages with lots of instrumentation can be jumbled and unresolved.  Lyrical content can be more difficult to comprehend.  Bass can be less accurate, too boomy or too weak.  With inferior cable music can seem rolled off at frequency extremes and have less dynamic capability.  These differences are real and many have experienced this.  I can't understand why so many deny it, when the positive attributes of implementing well designed cabling is significant in my listening space.  It took lots of trail and error and break in time is a pain, but in the end when you have cables that perform well with good equipment, the musical experience is certainly enhanced.  The result is an accurately reproduced, expansive, and extremely lifelike presentation of the tunes that is pleasurable!

Well wax waves, I have heard little to no improvement over fairly mundane cable technology, in my system. I use Canare Starquad microphone cable for interconnect. For speaker cable I use Goertz when I'm not using an exotic solution which only works in my system (nichrome wire speaker cables instead of resistors at the speaker).

I understand that some cables will sound unrefined and nasty in some systems, while others will sound fine. I suspect that this is because some cables act as filters, removing the nasties. I also suspect that this is not your opinion.

Yes terry9, in some cases a cable will sound just fine.  You would never know what you were missing.

I think some cables do act as filters, but not in the sense that most think.  The cable is not filtering thru the audio signal, but filtering OUT all of the crap that is detrimental.  Mainly stuff that comes in on the a/c line that keeps the equipment from optimal performance.  I'm a fan of what ferox has done for my system as well as the Bybee products.