Why Do Cables Matter?

@reimarc 

Clever.

@thyname 
Yes I do have a dedicated room for 2 track. This afternoon 6/22 a person from Steinway and Sons is going to look at my room so everything may change. I'm a little intimidated because of a lot of things I don't have on par with great audiophile systems. I have a Steinway Spirio grand piano that plays back perfectly, it is the best hifi piece of equipment I own it is in its own room built for the piano, no transducer of any kind, it's perfect (well it has 1000 levels of dynamic resolution for every key which is good enough. I've recorded 1000s of pianos but never got any recording to sound like a real one. I'm convinced by @rodman99999 and his article he pointed me to that cables do make a difference in a measurable way. So you all have convinced me! See I wasn't a troll after all. Thanks.

@cleeds I have recorded and mixed 100s of orchestras and it's much more forgiving than doing a recording of an actor who is getting $20M to act in a movie. They don't want to do looping and you are always on defense in production sound there are HMI light that are often buzzing and if you need to tell the DP his light needs to be fixed he'll tell the director the sound guy is going to take an hour out of your day for his sound while I relight, there is constantly problems like that even on huge shows. Recording a single actor or 20 actors in a room is the hardest mixing and recording I've done by far you can't make a mistake in live the mistake is over in studio you can simply fix it (studio is the easiest). You couldn't be more wrong about that part of your post. Sure recording an actor in the studio is easy except for matching the production sound in a studio takes a lot of talent and listening effort. The microphone boom operator IMO requires the most talent for listening, when I did that I would cary the boom with the main microphone everywhere I went with my headphones on all day so I would get to know the polar pattern of the microphone, in the studio you point the microphone at instrument that doesn't move or interact with other noisy things while they are changing positions, recording music is easy compared with production sound. 

I have no extreme reverence for knowing what the original record was I'm just saying if you didn't do the original recording then haw can you or anyone else talk about the proper image or the tightness of the bass, you can make the tightest bass ever just add gating, ducking, and lots of compression. Tighter and wider on every recording isn't always correct.

@donavabdear : having a dedicated room solely for two channel audio is huge. It is a great starting point. Now, in addition to two (matched pair) speakers, you would need the 2-channel equipment. Preferably dedicated to two-channels (stereo), and not multichannel. Amp(s), preamp, DAC, etc. etc. All two channel. And of course, room treatments, which I think you are pretty familiar with and knowledgeable. You can then experiment with cables, ideally with a return policy and no risk trial. There is no substitute to experimenting for yourself. And it is fun. That is if you enjoy experimenting. Not a chore, if it becomes a chore, and frustrating, it’s not worth dealing with. We all do what we enjoy. This is a hobby, not a job.

Enjoy the process, and hopefully the results.

donavabdear

I have recorded and mixed 100s of orchestras and it's much more forgiving than doing a recording of an actor who is getting $20M to act in a movie ...

I don't think there's any correlation at all between what an actor or musician gets paid, and the difficulty in recording them well. It's silly to claim otherwise. Certainly, you're entitled to your opinions, but recording the dialogue of a single voice - something easily transmitted over any telephone - is inherently simpler than recording the complex sounds and wide dynamic range of an orchestra. Of course, fidelity for film must be better than cell phone quality, but the phone proves it doesn't take much to record the identifiable qualities of a human voice.

... if you didn't do the original recording then haw can you or anyone else talk about the proper image or the tightness of the bass ...

You can't rely on any single recording. But you can rely on groups of recordings, some with consistent, repeatable, identifiable characteristics (such as the Mercury Living Presence series), to tune the sound of a system. If you also make your own recordings, as I sometimes do, the task is made easier.