It's Simple

Ok, let’s do this!  I’ve owned more than a considerable cross section of various cables and gear over the past 4 decades.  In my experience, the only cabling that could consistently reproduce the full measure of my musical repertoire, have had networks on them.  Without the “boxes”, the noise floor was higher, low level details were buried, dynamics were constricted, natural body and weight of instruments were reduced and tone, texture and timbre were less faithfully reproduced.  Harmonic complexity and the acoustic envelope around the recording space was also glossed over without those “silly boxes” attached!  Personally, I’ve never cared for following anyone’s personal audio-religion...I simply layed down my cash and listened.  For me, the snake oil is in the non-network cable manufacturers offerings...different combinations of exotic metals, cryogenically treated connectors, geometries etc..  These differences do change what you hear, but they do not address the damage that is being done to the signal along the way.  Like I said, if you truly love great performances of well recorded music and you wish to experience as much of the ethereal magic as is contained in your musical recordings, then what you actually do need is “snake oil”!  Everything else is just wire 

Roberjerman, you may not have noticed that Kijanki referred to the inductive reactance of a certain cable as being 1 ohm at 20 kHz, not to its inductance being 1 ohm. As you may realize, inductive reactance is the impedance presented by an inductance at a certain frequency, and it has a magnitude that is measured in ohms.

And of course 1 ohm will certainly not be insignificant relative to the impedance of some speakers at 20 kHz, especially many electrostatics. Some Martin-Logan models have impedances of 0.4 ohms at 20 kHz, which would cause a 1 ohm cable reactance to have dramatic consequences. On the other hand, though, low cable inductance doesn’t have to cost a fortune.

ieales 2-26-2017
Another’s opinion on a particular cable may not be valid unless they have a very similar system.

There is a significant degree of truth in this statement, especially given the use of the word "may." As many audiophiles recognize, cable behavior is often system dependent to a significant degree, and in particular may depend on the characteristics of what the cable is connecting. Some examples:

1)In the case of the speaker cable Kijanki referred to, a speaker having high impedance at high frequencies, such as many dynamic speakers, will be relatively insensitive to the inductive reactance he described. While other speakers, such as many electrostatics, will be very sensitive to it. That has no particular relation, by the way, to the sound quality or musical resolution of the speakers; it just relates to their sensitivity to cable differences.

2)If an interconnect having relatively high capacitance is compared with one having relatively low capacitance, and if everything else is equal, the higher capacitance cable will produce a duller and more sluggish response in the upper treble region if used as a line-level interconnect (especially if it is driven by a component having high output impedance), due to the interaction of cable capacitance and component output impedance; while the exact opposite result will occur if those same two cables are compared in a phono cable application and driven by a moving magnet cartridge, due to the interaction of cable capacitance and cartridge inductance.

3) It is easily possible for digital cable "A" to outperform digital cable "B" in a given system when both cables are of a certain length, and for cable "B" to outperform cable "A" even in that same system if both cables are of some other length. That may result from differences in the arrival time of signal reflections which occur at the RF frequency components that are present in digital audio signals as a result of less than perfect impedance matches, and cable-related differences in ground loop-related noise that may be riding on the signal, both of which can contribute to timing jitter at the point of D/A conversion. The happenstance of the relationships between cable length, signal risetimes and falltimes, cable propagation velocity, component susceptibility to ground loop-related noise, the happenstance of how closely the impedances of both components and the cable match, and the jitter rejection capability of the DAC, all figure into that.

Regards,
-- Al

Wow another cable troll. Congrats on your first thread. Trolling sure is simple.

@almarg ,

AL, Great post! It's a keeper!

Jim

+1 Almarg

In the end it boils down to the choice of components. 

Are the components high fidelity or not?

Are the components designed to give accurate high fidelity that is independent of the cables used and their length or not?

A setup that sounds different with every slightly different piece of wire is obviously NOT high fidelity - the sound is all over the place and totally dependent on extraneous factors which can never be properly controlled or determined.