Do speaker cables really make a difference ?

Human nature is predisposed to a self-fulfilling prophecy...you believe therefore it is true. 

And you completely immune to to those shortcomings of the human nature? What you are describing is confirmation bias, which by definition, goes both ways.

Interesting read here:

My conclusions here is an ASR sleeper cell has been awoken.

This study is on Single End and XLR Interconnects but the research is out there.

@dadawada where is your empirical, scientific data that refutes what we hear. Rather you start spinning just like Amir did when @kota1 engaged him on a similar subject.

Well...pull your heads out of the sand for a moment and go do some research...or not...and you will see plenty of people that know a lot more than me who say the same thing and have done actual scientific test to prove it.

Enjoy your little echo chamber.. 🙄

Microsoft Word - Interconnect-cable-measurements--Kunchur.docx (sc.edu)

Summary and Conclusions
The effect of cables on the sonic performance of an audio system has been a contentious subject for a few decades [31]. The controversy is fueled in part by the paucity of journal-published blind listening tests that prove there is at all an audible difference. Listening tests are tricky and can easily produce both false negative and false positive results; the relevant psychology and neurology is reviewed in [1, 32–36]. Another reason for disbelief in interconnect audibility may be due to a misguided focus on irrelevant measurements such as frequency response, resistance, and nominal reactance, whose resulting signal errors are indeed far below the presumed audibility thresholds.

The present work investigated other kinds of signal alterations during transmission through a cable, besides the above parameters. It was found that noise in some cables exists at audible levels. While the nominal reactive time constants may possibly be too short (<100 ns) for discernibility, the decay times arising from non- ideal effects are not obviously negligible (~1 s), especially when multiple occurrences combine along the audio chain. Within the audio community at large, there tends to be a misunderstanding and underestimation of the spectacular capabilities and extraordinary sensitivity of human hearing: For example, the ear can detect a cochlear basilar-membrane amplitude of ∼1 pm [37–39] and has a temporal resolution in the microseconds that has no direct connection with the maximum audible frequency.

The present work found clear systematic differences in the electrical performance of interconnect cables of different grades. Besides the electrical signal alterations studied here, vibrational effects (“microphonics”) may also potentially affect cable performance [17]. However unlike loudspeaker cables, interconnects lie in high impedance circuits and carry low currents. Thus they have smaller magnetic forces and induced voltages from mechanical motion. Another potential source of signal degradation in cables is triboelectric noise from internal motion; but it is estimated to be 180 dB below typical signal levels [45].

Previous work [1] demonstrated the audibility of cable pathways, pointing to differences in RF noise pickup as the likely cause. But it left open the question of whether the noise differences were due to shielding or balanced versus unbalanced topologies. The present work sheds light on that question by showing that its unbalanced cable S (of the same brand as cable A in [1]) is almost equally quiet. Furthermore, there are clear time-domain performance differences between the various interconnects tested. While cable manufacturers undoubtedly make a variety of measurements on their own products during the course of their development, the present results are of value to the consumer because they provide measurements across different brands made by a non-commercial entity.

Posted by our friends at WBF.

Video summary of the above paper. 

He is Hungarian,  this is a good Speaker Cable 101 video.

@dadawada it's all about money, for you skeptics, right? All I read is "expensive cables", "it's your money", "a fool and his money", etc etc... looks like the wallet is as tight as the ears canals, for you folks. More seriously, had you ever made actual experiments, you would know that, for example, Belden 9497 cable sounds VERY different from similarly priced, entry level cable. There are people who actually PREFER the sound signature of the Belden cable, to the sound signature of cables costing much more. 

What's more, if confirmation bias is indeed a thing, because yes we are humans, it does go BOTH WAYS and you people are not immune to it, as @thyname pointed out. Weirdly, when someone states this (and there is no way around it: it IS a fact, IT DOES GO BOTH WAYS) there's never any answer from the skeptics. You guys usually choose to ignore the remark. 

I'll keep calling people "trolls" when they behave as such, and frankly, coming ON THE CABLE FORUM and basically calling us cable believers (and I wouldn't be surprised, in the grand scheme of things, if we are quite the majority) "delusional" or "fools" is nothing else than TROLLING. I've been trying all manners of cables, from the cheapest to the expensive, in the last 25 years and let me say this, if you can't hear the differences between two cables made of different geometry / materials, then how can you hear the difference between two DACs? Between two amplifiers? And HOW, good Lord, HOW DO YOU PICK YOUR ELECTRONICS and HOW DO YOU BUILD YOUR SYSTEMS? do you exclusively look at numbers? Ears are NOT TO BE TRUSTED!

...Trolls....