Why Do Cables Matter?

Have you ever tried it? What were there [sic] results? "Unlikely" how, share more?

Tried it more times than I can count.

I remember when I first tried Kimber speaker cable which sounded outstanding in the store. I don't recall my system at the time, but I returned them the next day. I think the cable may have been Oracle which I used until Monster came out with a superior 'pro' product in the 80's.

At that point, I had biamped Tympani [III? IV?] with a custom 70wpc tube amp, & 350wpc SS for the woofers with short cables right behind the speakers. AR SP[?] pre reworked by Michael Fraser, Conrad Johnson MC amp, MC cartridge, Goldmund TT in another room on a stand bolted to the concrete and connected to the power amps with 20[?] feet of Mark Levinson silver [litz?]. The Monster Cable was the first that improved over the Oracle in my system after other cable positive speaker cable store demos.

In the 80's I was a recording engineer. I became an unpaid Monster Cable consultant after Noel Lee loaned me a prototype of a new professional mic cable. On Neumann and Telefunken tube microphones, it blew us away.

We had different microphones, EQ, mic pre, compressors, limiters, to adjust the sound. We now had cables that allowed us to use less of the preceding.

I'd sometimes accompany the sales rep to studios and explain what we experienced. Taking the same sets of cables from studio to studio as demos, results varied from meh to none to stunning depending on what gear was on either end.

A valid determination can only be made in situ as everything else there contributes.

@yoyoyaya thanks for your response. 
#1 You can't add information to a recording.

#2 Recording studios don't use very expensive interconnects and speaker cable.

#3 Since #1 and #2 are true it is illogical to use cables that are more expensive than the recording studio is using. 

Please don't be silly and point to an exception in which a studio uses very expensive cables i'm speaking in general terms with nearly 40 years of recording experience at the highest levels. You didn't think statement 1 and 2 went together, they do because of the agreed upon idea that there is entropy in information you can't do better than the original. Try arguing that cables or any piece of hyper expensive playback equipment can add information / fidelity to the original. It's going to be tough without AI.

You are missing the point that the average stereo system extracts just a fraction of the information from the recording.  More resolving systems extract more information.  I hear footfalls, whispers, movements in recordings.  It was very distracting at first but I have learned to tune that out.  Still, I’m not crazy about listening to my system in the dark.  It often feels like people are moving around in the room.

@donavabdear. At the risk of flogging a dead horse, the point is that one is aiming to retrieve the information which is already there and not to add information which is not present in the recording.

Thanks for re-presenting your propositions. There is no connection of any kind between statement numbers one and two. They are just two different statements and so no conclusion can be drawn from them.

Your concluding "try arguing" statement is a prime example of a straw man distraction fallacy.

@yoyoyaya earnest question for you.

You said,

the point is that one is aiming to retrieve the information which is already there and not to add information which is not present in the recording.

Original recordings vary a lot (as you know). When an original recording was something made for car radios or some other mass listening application, they sometimes exhibit qualities which, on a good stereo, sound bad. When audiophiles seeks ways of dealing with that -- say with a tube DAC or EQ or certain cables, etc. -- are they trying to remove information in the original recording in order to make it sound better?

I really don’t know the answer to this, so I would appreciate anyone with experience explaining what is happening to the "information" in the original recording when we try to make it sound better.

Also, consider this analogy: when we take raw steak and cook it and add garlic salt, are we obscuring or reducing the original flavor information in the meat?

You see the analogy I’m trying to make, but perhaps it is not a good analogy? Feel free to attack it!