Devilboy,
I never said cables always CHANGE the sound.
But you wrote:
Cables add their own flavor to the Sonic signature of your system. They are in fact, tone controls.
How does not imply that when you change audio cables, you change the sound? And you didn’t add any caveat like "sometimes."
Just for an example, if the wire inside of your components is X and the wire connecting those components is Y, then wouldn’t be logical to assume that you are adding something different to the signal?
In terms of altering the audible content of the signal?
No. That doesn’t necessarily follow at all. That a cable carries a musical signal does not entail that it "flavors" the musical signal. A competent working cable shouldn’t "flavor" the sound, it just passes the signal along. If the cables within the component are not altering the signal within the audible spectrum, and the cable you attach to the component is not altering the signal within the audible spectrum...(and those are measurable) then there’s no reason to think one cable is "flavoring" the sound any differently than the other. No more than transferring your pictures or software from one computer to another will alter or "flavor" them differently. Sure analog isn’t as reliable as digital in terms of replication, but electrical theory is reliable enough to do a very good job at preserving fidelity. That’s pretty much why we have electrical theory to describe how you transmit a signal reliably among different cables, and the reasoning behind cable construction and selection in the first place. It’s why, for instance, in the interconnect cable tests I linked to, you saw essentially identical measurements among different cables, and no one could reliably tell the sound apart.
If every single cable altered the actual sound signal to the degree many audiophiles seem to assume, audio fidelity should be utterly horrible, given how many cables sound passes through from recording to mixing to mastering through all the components in consumer systems.