Dynaquest4
I will not attempt to change your mind about, well, anything. But I will use one of your statements to make a theoretical case for several ways cabling interacts with your whole system, and how that can be more rewarding with more accurate or revealing gear.
"Assuming that exotic cables do, in fact, cancel out or mitigate external influences that distort or otherwise modify pure audio signal transmission, it would seem that the more expensive your system, the less you would need cables and other interconnects to assuage these issues. But, no...it seems otherwise. The more you spend on your system components the more you need to spend on wire to cancel out these external influences. Interesting."
Assuming the quest of many audiophiles at one level is to come as close to faithful reproduction of the original recording as possible, then doing everything within budget and set up as possible would seem like an obvious goal. Cabling affects this pursuit in at least three ways.
1. Keep bad things away from the original signal. Bad "things" in the environment around your cables can come from several sources, devices in your home, building or neighborhood that emit electrical fields or interference, your systems own electronics, and its other cables that all come together behind your rack. Effectively keeping desired signals in their lane and interference out of their lane so the original signal arrives at its destination relatively unscathed is the goal here. This is one way good power cables can help, even though they are not purpose built to transmit any of your processed data. The better the original signal, the more rewarding the effective treatment of this problem.
2. Keep the cable itself from differentialy absorbing or only preserving some portion of the audible spectrum in your signal, or smearing the time signature of different elements in the audio signal. This is where the tone control idea comes in, and "better" cables keep this from happening to the greatest degree, I.E. they do not act as tone controls at all, allowing you for better or worse to hear what your electronics and speakers are trying to do. When you start hearing differences in room acoustics, production and the sound engineers choices, you are getting "the rest of the story".
3. Because different electronics and speakers have different output and input impedances, resistive loads, efficiencies, etc. not every cable will match well with every piece of gear, and so "bad" cable/gear match can reduce how effectively the above cable attributes are revealed in practice, so some thought and trial and error are in order to get the best results in cable choice.
OK, so why would expensive, well designed gear benefit at all from well designed cables? Well for starters, assume that better gear is generally producing more accurate signals out of the gate, and protecting these signals enhances the value, investment in, and enjoyment of better gear.
Also, your top end gear only reduces the need to address issues one and three above to the extent that each piece is not a significant source of electrical interference to the room or area where your cables are concentrated, or back into the power grid, and that your gear is not presenting odd loads or other electrical properties to the cabling, so protecting signals from intereference resulting from other sources in your listening room is still a valid goal, even if your gear is completely begnign in this regard (which it very likely is not).
And, regardless of how good the signal is when it leaves your gear, it has to get to the next piece of gear for processing intact. If the cabling absorbs any of the very expensive and accurate signal you are generating, I am going to go out on a limb and say that’s BAD.
So in summary, the better the gear, the better and more information rich the signal (analog or digital), and the better you should be able to notice when some of it is left behind of suffers some artifact in transit, or when such problem is corrected. To the extent that a user wants certain artifacts because they find that pleasing, then cables can be a part of "tuning" any system to the extent that they may be better at passing one or more signal elements relative some other cable.
I hear a difference as a result of all these processes operating in each of my systems. And my better gear sounds better to me with different and often but not always more expensive and sophisticated wires in between. But what is really remarkable is how good some very inexpensive gear can sound with better designed and implemented cables (not always... in some cases it just sounds... really inexpensive). While this does not pencil out for the average user, the results can be quit shocking, and can demonstrate just how universal the the properties above apply, and how well-designed some inexpensive equipment really is. Just my experience here, YMMV a lot.
kn
I will not attempt to change your mind about, well, anything. But I will use one of your statements to make a theoretical case for several ways cabling interacts with your whole system, and how that can be more rewarding with more accurate or revealing gear.
"Assuming that exotic cables do, in fact, cancel out or mitigate external influences that distort or otherwise modify pure audio signal transmission, it would seem that the more expensive your system, the less you would need cables and other interconnects to assuage these issues. But, no...it seems otherwise. The more you spend on your system components the more you need to spend on wire to cancel out these external influences. Interesting."
Assuming the quest of many audiophiles at one level is to come as close to faithful reproduction of the original recording as possible, then doing everything within budget and set up as possible would seem like an obvious goal. Cabling affects this pursuit in at least three ways.
1. Keep bad things away from the original signal. Bad "things" in the environment around your cables can come from several sources, devices in your home, building or neighborhood that emit electrical fields or interference, your systems own electronics, and its other cables that all come together behind your rack. Effectively keeping desired signals in their lane and interference out of their lane so the original signal arrives at its destination relatively unscathed is the goal here. This is one way good power cables can help, even though they are not purpose built to transmit any of your processed data. The better the original signal, the more rewarding the effective treatment of this problem.
2. Keep the cable itself from differentialy absorbing or only preserving some portion of the audible spectrum in your signal, or smearing the time signature of different elements in the audio signal. This is where the tone control idea comes in, and "better" cables keep this from happening to the greatest degree, I.E. they do not act as tone controls at all, allowing you for better or worse to hear what your electronics and speakers are trying to do. When you start hearing differences in room acoustics, production and the sound engineers choices, you are getting "the rest of the story".
3. Because different electronics and speakers have different output and input impedances, resistive loads, efficiencies, etc. not every cable will match well with every piece of gear, and so "bad" cable/gear match can reduce how effectively the above cable attributes are revealed in practice, so some thought and trial and error are in order to get the best results in cable choice.
OK, so why would expensive, well designed gear benefit at all from well designed cables? Well for starters, assume that better gear is generally producing more accurate signals out of the gate, and protecting these signals enhances the value, investment in, and enjoyment of better gear.
Also, your top end gear only reduces the need to address issues one and three above to the extent that each piece is not a significant source of electrical interference to the room or area where your cables are concentrated, or back into the power grid, and that your gear is not presenting odd loads or other electrical properties to the cabling, so protecting signals from intereference resulting from other sources in your listening room is still a valid goal, even if your gear is completely begnign in this regard (which it very likely is not).
And, regardless of how good the signal is when it leaves your gear, it has to get to the next piece of gear for processing intact. If the cabling absorbs any of the very expensive and accurate signal you are generating, I am going to go out on a limb and say that’s BAD.
So in summary, the better the gear, the better and more information rich the signal (analog or digital), and the better you should be able to notice when some of it is left behind of suffers some artifact in transit, or when such problem is corrected. To the extent that a user wants certain artifacts because they find that pleasing, then cables can be a part of "tuning" any system to the extent that they may be better at passing one or more signal elements relative some other cable.
I hear a difference as a result of all these processes operating in each of my systems. And my better gear sounds better to me with different and often but not always more expensive and sophisticated wires in between. But what is really remarkable is how good some very inexpensive gear can sound with better designed and implemented cables (not always... in some cases it just sounds... really inexpensive). While this does not pencil out for the average user, the results can be quit shocking, and can demonstrate just how universal the the properties above apply, and how well-designed some inexpensive equipment really is. Just my experience here, YMMV a lot.
kn