Do Costly XLR Cables Make A Difference?

@reimarc the field is zero when it is connected but not energising the conductors with a signal.
Maybe there is a gradient in the room as one moves up, but it should still be around zero with a cable that is driven closer to what the local ground it at.

With respect to smearing, the speed of light is pretty high, and unless the cable is quite long, or there is a lot of dispersion (which looks like group delay), then I cannot imagine a huge contribution.

That fact that many people are not critical of time delay, nor group delay in speakers, seems at odds with being very concerned with it popping up to a lower extent in the cables.

Maybe it does, but I doubt I can afford many of those cables.

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 can always hear a difference when I know how much the gear costs and I am looking directly at it.

When one can tell a difference in a blind A/B test, then it suggests that the difference is more than thee chance of a good guess… or seeing the cable while listening.
If there are 6 dozen cables that sound similar, and one differs, it might mean that the 6 are all more neutral ones. But it doesn’t mean that we might llke the odd sounding one better.

I am using Siltech Crown prince XLR,s at the moment. which is a good cable for sound. I have not had a more pricey cable to try for sound difference but know it better then a cheaper one. At this moment i feel that changing the plugs on my power cables {black cat} to Furutech NCF make my music sound crisper. For a cheaper price than upgrading my XLR cables. The rhodiums help with the bass and the silvers more with mids and highs. My system is Parasound JC5 amp, MBL Noble pre and cd dac. With Crystal Cable Arabesque Glassmaster speakers.

YES!!

I like to place my front end components on the side wall so they are not between the speakers and run long balanced cables to monoblocks which sit very close to the speakers. This allows me to use very short speaker cables, but means my Preamp to amp interconnects are 7M. My other interconnects are quite short (1M or less). I could not discern much difference between relatively inexpensive cables (e.g. Mogami) and more expensive cables for these short connections, but the differences were much more apparent with the 7M connections. 

I ended up settling on Iconoclast 4x4 UP-OCC interconnects. These are not outrageously expensive in longer lengths (now about $4k for 7M, was a bit less when I bought them) and provided a nice improvement in detail and a modest improvement in image solidity compared to other cables I tried. I didn't try any of the Uber-expensive cables though. 

And yes, my equipment (DIY) does adhere to the AES standard. 

@jaytor

…

I could not discern much difference between relatively inexpensive cables (e.g. Mogami) and more expensive cables for these short connections, but the differences were much more apparent with the 7M connections.

I believe it. The most likely explanation is the interconnects you use between preamp and amp(s) are what influences the sound the most. I was in the same boat when I moved my front end components to the side wall and ran a 15ft Mogami XLRs to my amp for a month or so. It was not even close to what the AZ Absolute Copper sounded like. During that time I tried different interconnects and power cables on the source components and the Mogami were always the bottleneck in realizing the improvements brought by those changes.
I ended up moving everything back to be able to use my 1m AZs between the pre and amp again. Way more benefits using higher quality cables than removing a 5 shelf vertical rack from between the speakers. Now if the AZs weren’t so expensive for a 5m set it would’ve been a no brainer.