Cables to settle brightness

@duckworp I doubt it's the Denafrips.  It's the fifth DAC I tried and best sounding of all except maybe my old DAC, which wasn't as good sounding in other ways, much more homogeneous sounding, making everything sound warm and smooth with reasonable detail.  I am pretty sure it's the fact that I went from WiFi using coax cable to Ethernet using both USB and I2S over HDMI.  Lots of variables, no time to try and identify exactly what the problem is, and I have blown my hifi budget for at least this year.  Whaddya gonna do?

Wires are tone control, there is not way around it, its just the physics of cables. To tame the brightness try to find some cables that have conductors of larger diameter than the cables your are using.

Assuming one already has decent cables, they can definitely influence sound. I had Audioquest Rocket 44s in my setup which I bought just to get the system going which were very good but certainly not a top tier cable.

I recently added in Clarus Crimson cables which are higher quality copper and multi-strand. Based on other member's experience I spoke with, I wanted to try these to take the slight edge off the brightness I was getting on certain recordings as well as step up the quality of speaker cables given the rest of the system has leveled up.

These cables did what I was hoping, the system is as detailed if not more detailed than before but most importantly took the edge off the slight brightness. It also gave more body to the mid-range. The improvement was not as significant as changing other major components but just enough to do exactly what I was looking for.

TARA LABS OR PURIST.

The amount of contradictory answers on this thread is mesmerizing.

Yes, you can cure (to a point) brightness by swapping cables, but I would first try a different DAC and see if things get better. Then eventually fine-tune with cables. It makes me laugh when I read "do not use cables as tone controls". Cables have a sound, and you pretty much cannot do without them, so they have to be taken into consideration when you voice a system. It is those who consider cables as mere physical connections without any sonic personality who have it all wrong, and good luck to them achieving what they want.