Quite a bit of the modern gear reclocks at one end of the transmission chain, or both.
this will narrow the differences in cables to some degree.
Then one is left with figuring out if the reclocking on board the given device ...is substandard or not. And whether that given reclocking is messing up cable qualities analysis, or not. Or by what degree, is the usual reality.
This is why one has to be careful in what one thinks they hear with a given cable/dac/source combination which is in play.
Beside the issue of whether the given listener has the mental/physical wherewithal to have discernment or preference for the given scenario that is at hand.
traditionally, relocking is not there, so older dacs with lower resolution can many times have more of the given cable’s intrinsic qualities come shining through.
This is due to the external coaxial cabling and system of transfer, was originally intended to never leave the confines of the given CD player. It was meant to be an internal hardware method of moving the bits off the cd proper and into the DAC chipset proper. It was never meant to be externalized into what it is today. Most importantly, the clocking data was embedded into the signal and transferred by the internal cable. Which is now an external coaxial cable. so the jitter of the transport/read... became the jitter of the dac. bit-word timing was determined by the cd read hardware and the spinning disc system itself. Coaxial is legacy hardware from the literal first days of digital audio on the CD format. Modern implementation has re-clocking at the DAC receiver end of things. If you read carefully, you see that the jitter of the cable, it's complex set of overall characteristics... comes into play in such a system of signal transfer.
Just...sort of ...restating the argument of the whole process, with regard to fundamentals.