Why Do Cables Matter?

Find a reputable and experienced audio dealer with a great listening room. Bring a few friends, and a few others with ears to do a real listening session for two hours.

Bring your highly praised and affordable Mogami interconnect cables people like to rave about for recording studios. Arrange to have some other good cables on hand.

Listen for at least an hour. Swap, listen again. Ask the group to report differences.

If you can’t hear a difference, live on with your cables, save $. Watch out for those who can hear a difference with a properly designed set of cables. They are not cheap.  

^^^

The above is utterly pointless. Any deltas are specific to that system and room and unlikely to translate to an entirely different system.

There are plenty of expensive cables that are demonstrably designed to be 'tone controls' and are by no means an improvement on any but a small subset of equipment.

Ieales needs a graphic equalizer- much easier for adjusting the tone of his system.

Back in the eighties, I replaced the pair of thin black ic’s that came with a CD player,  from my preamp to my amp with Monsters. I think I paid $160 a pair for them and the difference was more than night and day! It was huge!  

I've never weighed in on this but am in the "I can hear a difference" column. 

As a musician (75 yrs old) I've played in a lot of different groups with a lot of different musicians at all levels. The really good players have a subtlety to their playing - no matter the instrument. What I've noticed is that many of the musicians I've played with who have been playing for many years  "think" they play as well as the exceptional musicians and I've come to believe that they simply do not hear the nuance and subtlety of the top musicians. The top musicians DO hear it and learn to apply that sensitivity to their playing. In other words, some people hear nuance and subtlety that others don't. For me that is one explanation for this continued discussion.

I listen exclusively to headphones so listening room is not part of the equation. I also have certain tracks I've listened to for many years and when upgrading anything I always notice a change in different parts of the recording. Some I like, others I don't. I've purchased expensive cables that I didn't like and returned. Others brought a level of sensitivity I hadn't heard before.