Do Costly XLR Cables Make A Difference?

Earlier today I posted a recommendation to compare the current XLRs to some bargain cables that can be had from any music supply retailer, costing in the $15-$40 range. Implication was if there was no sonic difference noticed then no need to progress. 

However, my post was removed. I’d like to know why.  It was intended as a reasonable and cost effective potential solution. Not everybody on this forum has thousands to spend on cables. Some audiophiles appreciate a low cost option. 
 

Was my post considered facetious?  It wasn’t. 

 

Earlier today I posted a recommendation to compare the current XLRs to some bargain cables that can be had from any music supply retailer, costing in the $15-$40 range. Implication was if there was no sonic difference noticed then no need to progress.

However, my post was removed. I’d like to know why. It was intended as a reasonable and cost effective potential solution. Not everybody on this forum has thousands to spend on cables. Some audiophiles appreciate a low cost option.

Was my post considered facetious? It wasn’t.

And the first response (mine) in this thread suggested the same thing @volumizer .
If the $2k cables can be picked out compared to the $25 ones 7 times out of 10, then there is a reason to believe that the OP should be looking at other cables.

if not, then…?

I am sort of a cheap fellow… so my $50 IC cables are Mogami and Nuetrik with solder and flux cost and I use the brown jacket so they match the wood floor colour and hide any coffee stains. Maybe those cables are more like $100 in value, so I am only getting the exact length I need with my wire cutters, iron, and effort.

If I were Ryder, I would follow one of the advices above (muvluv) and try to make my own cable, honestly: that’s one of my future projects as well. If you look at the architecture of a "naked" cable, it seems that the most important factor will be the nature of your conductor (e.g. 99.9999% pure and drawn non-crystalline or single-crystal copper, silver, or a Cu/Au alloy wire, which can be bought from Mundorf in Germany) shielded by a non-muddling insulation such as cotton,

what causes muddling and is the muddling measurable?
If it is some hysterysis of the dielectric, that say a battery bias is trying to overcome… then does the cotton address the hysterysis to achieve the same result?

extra-thin silicon or even air, plus the amount of material resistance and the resulting impedance of the entire cable (in tis context urbiecontribution about Neotech’s square OCC copper or silver conductors is worth following up, I would submit). All these factors contribute to the degree of "purity" of an audio signal.

I got some cotton jacked wire for IC cables but, again, can this stuff be measured or picked out in a blind test?
I am assuming that the capacitance may be lower as the dielectric constant decreases, but unless the thing driving it has a high output impedance, then does that even matter?

Is the “purity” of this audio signal measurable? And how does it show up? I.e. In what measurement? @reimarc

I honestly do not know, @holmz: I never did the comparison in a blind A/B setting, let alone did I perform any measurements. I just re-iterated what I had read in various blogs and articles written by specialists (I, on the other hand, am an organic chemist and not an electrical engineer). My only personal reference would be swapping insulated Mogami XLRs for "naked" Anticable ones; and as I have said: the acoustic differences were minor (I got the Anticables for a basement discount, btw). But I must say nevertheless: reading deeply into the physics behind cable design and architecture was quite humbling. There is a lot more going on, then just sending current through a wire, when it comes to a veracious reproduction of highly modulated and complex audio signals, that's for sure; and the scientist in me thinks there might be still effects out there which we do not know about and hence do not know how to correctly measure and quantify. On the other hand, though: the final link in the event chain is our brain, and just before that our innate mechanism to transform minute tree-dimensional air pressure variations into electrical signals. And quite obviously, the fidelity of this mechanism suffers from age. In other words, whatever objective truth there might be behind what we read about cable X being "better" than cable Y, it might just no longer be audible to us once we finally got the financial means to embark on the serious quest for the audio Grail.

Thanks @reimarc .
 

…
There is a lot more going on, then just sending current through a wire, …

It is more like sending the electric field around the wire, then current in the wire for an IC.
A speaker cable has more of the current. 

Cotton and “naked” are more affecting the field and how it propagates. Whether we hear much of what is happening is uncertain, but it could get pretty nuanced.

I got some cotton ones to try out.

@reimarc - What's most interesting is that even if we could measure every aspect of cables and audio equipment in general, listener preference would still trump.  My ideal would be to meaningfully correlate measurements to sound signatures so that it would be possible to use the measurements to make at least an educated as to whether I might appreciate the product.