Do Costly XLR Cables Make A Difference?

Thanks @reimarc .
 

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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.

I would agree with Whipsaw.  If you've got a good 2k cable, spending a lot more may only yield a very small improvement, if any is even noticeable. You can spend thousands more chasing rainbows. If you're going to make a leap, go much higher and buy Audioquest Dragon.  If you don't hear an improvement, lesson learned.  If you do hear an improvement, stop there. Don't be tempted to go into the stratosphere of Crystal Cable (despite what Jonathan Valin says in The Absolute Sound) or top of the line Siltech unless you're a Saudi oil sheik and don't care.

For holmz: check this website for cotton-insulated wires: https://www.vhaudio.com/unicrystal-occ-silver-wire.html

BTW: the way I understand it, the electromagnetic field around the conductor arises the moment it gets connected. What we call the 'signal" is actually a disturbance of this field traveling along the conductor at near-light speed. However, the material-dependent impedance of the conductor is responsible for the time-aligned transmission over all frequencies; hence the "smearing" of the signal at higher impedance. This part is still puzzling me: if the event takes place around the conductor and not through it, how can its material make a difference? Or are some aspects of the field dependent on it? But again, I am not an electrical engineer or a physicist.

to mceljo: we actually do just that - or at least trying to - with loudspeaker frequency response curves, for example. They do actually give one a pretty good idea what the speakers may sound like (in an an-echoic chamber at least) by just looking at the graphs, including spacial resolution along the x- and y-axes. The shapes of square waves do a similar indicating job for amplifiers, jitter plots for DACs, etc. However - and I think that's what you are referring to - they are only approximations, neglecting what might be the most important part in sound-prediction: psychoacoustics (and of course the acoustic idiosyncrasies of one's listening room). I am not sure if we will be able to ever address psychoacoustics through electronic measurements of the gear, albeit many scientists are trying to do just that. Objectivity might rely on the generation of huge like/dislike data sets and analyzing them for congruences. But even that sort of analysis wound never address YOUr subjective preferences. Or, alternatively, an audiophile could undergo a set of standard evaluations, physical and psychological, to determine what aspect in a reproduced sound makes him/her tick, e.g. measuring brain activities during an MRI scan specifically pinpointing pleasure centers while using specific classes of sound reproducing techniques/gear (e.g. analog vs. digital), tube vs. transistors, chip-based vs, ladder-DAC, etc.). Coming out from such an evaluation - if done correctly- should help you with choosing the type of equipment that would trigger most successfully your pleasure centers, potentially influencing your buying choices in a dramatic way; and - after all - it's pleasure we are after in our listening rooms, no?