Disservice: XLR interconnects

Yes cables and interconnects matter BUT.

IMO there is a point of diminishing returns. Meaning that yes going from lamp cord to quality oxygen free speaker wire will have an impact that will justify the cost difference. Then there is a point that spending 2000% more for only a 10% increase in sound is in my world not worth the money. I have always tried to stick to a 2 to 1 ratio for my buys. Meaning double the cost for a 50% increase or four times the cost for a 100% increase. Might sound nuts and others will say I can’t really measure the end results. Well it has allowed for me to be in a place where I love my system, it was built within reasonable budget, and most important the music sounds fantastic.

@yyzsantabarbara: Yeah, my post was a sort of joke, as Ralph Karsten of Atma-Sphere has many times here asserted that hooking up two components which both adhere to AES 48 balanced pin configuration will result in the balanced cable contributing no sound of its own. As your post makes clear, not everyone agrees with Ralph's assertion.

@audphile1 What were the preamp and amp that you connected together?

My point was about preamp and amp that were AES48 compliant and XLR cables not having much sonic differences amongst decent cables. There are some differences but those were not something that made much of a difference.

However, removing all my gear, except the tiny AHB2 amps, from in-between the speakers because I use low cost long XLRs made a huge difference in the sound quality of my system. 

I was also a cable doubter but tried some used Silversmith Fidelium and heard a significant difference. Then I tried an expensive usb cable for crying out loud and that made a difference. This is some crazy business. I didn't think a cable that carries 1s and 0s could make any difference. I guess you just have to use your ears.

@dz13 are you serious about USB cable? I grew up with the notion its just carrying ones and zeroes and so what gives. Unless it's long enough where some data could get dropped. It's funny one of my senior design project was to write an error correction algorithm with encoding and decoding to ensure same data between source and destination.. Anyway, that is surprising and I might tweak and play with the usb cables..