I used to think pricey interconnects were snake oil...

@roadcykler “…things people believe… You can’t prove things with facts or objectivity so you have to have faith.“

I believe Audiophilia is more like a science, careful and systematic observation reveals important nuanced real world changes in sound quality produced by different components, and venues. Very little is taken on faith. It is not that science cannot explain these things, it is that there are so many variable… hundreds operating at once that science is not a useful way to a simply explain performance.

Consider five components, each made up with hundreds of parts with different materials, connected by wires with dozens if different variables, gauge, material, dielectric. This is not a situation that lends itself to say some five variables will explain the output, sound… and even if it did, the sound you get out highly depends on the speaker and room acoustics. I was a practicing scientist for over ten years… anything more than a few variables and simple prediction models become difficult… hundreds, useless. Look at the horsepower thrown at weather prediction. We don’t have supercomputers and dozens of measurement devices at labs developing electronics and in our homes to work out what effect a new preamp might have.

If that is not complicated enough, then you have folks with different listening skills and values in what they want to hear.

Then there is music… it is not a single test tone… but dozens of different tones… all varying in loudness and frequency over time and with harmonics effecting the sound in higher and lower frequencies.

Instead of all that, electronic designers listen to different designs and components to tune their products to perform a certain way. Audiophiles develop listening skills, developed and use a common terminology to describe sound quality in musical reproduction (see Robert Harley’s book, The Complete Guide to High End Audio), and we have professional reviewers review the sound of components and audiophiles on forums try to communicate general attributes of different components and how they might operate in each others systems.

In addition experienced folks try to coach those new to high end audio the ways of the Force… I mean audio.

I felt like you until I put a pair of Nordost V2 Valhalla XLRs between my preamp and amplifier…..

My favorite speaker cables are 10 AWG, cloth covered, 32 strand tinned copper with a pvc liner salvaged from a 1980's telephone transfer station and had relatively high voltage going through them on a daily basis for years, ie they were very thoroughly "burned in." I don't think there is anything more important than a very thorough burning in.

I have found all types of audio cables to be very necessary to be optimized for the best sound quality of the system. Once the sound quality of the system is brought up to at least a good level (and the audiophile ear becomes a little trained in identifying these effects), then sonic differences due to the cable design and construction become obvious and very important. This is regardless of whether blind tests were done to verify the cable evaluations. Blind tests are not reliable in finding the subtle effects of conductor purity and crystal size, dielectric, conductor construction (solid core, Litz,, ribbon), cable topology, etc. The trained human ear-brain system is vastly more sensitive than conventional electronic instrumentation. The meter-reader mindset ignores this fact.

Concerning the question as to whether digital cable quality is unimportant beyond a $300 or so retail price: The answer is that digital cable quality is very important, despite there being error detection and correction designs with many digital cables. The explanation for this in my experience is that the sonic differences with digital cables are even more important than with analog cables, and (unfortunately) the benefits of very expensive designs are immediately apparent.

I think the reason for this sensitivity of digital cable sound characteristics to the quality of the design, is that much or most of the sonic distortion in digital cables is due to pulse timing issues, which are generally ignored in conventional mass-market digital audio cable design. This is where the error logic of the cable interfaces is looking for the presence or absence of pulses within allowable time windows. Accordingly, fine errors in pulse timing within the overall error margins are not corrected for. Exact timing of the data bit pulses is very important to cable sonics, but low cost digital cables don’t try to optimize this parameter.

An average Joe decides to take his wife to a fine high end restaurant for a nice anniversary dinner.  He stares at the menu, sees salads and appetizers start at $25.  He is thinking to himself, I can get two dinner size salads at Zaxby’s for less than that.  Then he sees the steaks with the prices starting at $75.  Of course he is thinking about how he could have gotten a whole steak meal for the two of them at Longhorns for less money.  Nearing the end of the meal he is hoping his wife is too full to enjoy a dessert.  The tragedy here is multifaceted.  First, he missed out on a fine dining experience with his wife and likely stayed quiet or didn’t listen to her very well because he could only think about the prices.  Two, he missed out on enjoying the best meal he is going to have all year.  (Yes, this used to be me.)  If you go out for a nice meal, count the cost ahead of time and then enjoy a really special time.

My point is:  If you want to play in high end hi fi you have to pay.  Everyone loves showing off their gorgeous new speakers or shiny amplifiers but do not want to put much money into cables.  I don’t like buying expensive cables either but they are a vital part of a hifi system.  People spend big money on speakers and amps, dac’s etc and then wonder why the system sounds no better than a good mid fi set-up.  Well, power cords- which were my last hold out, are the most important consideration, I found followed by speaker cables and then interconnects.  If streaming then, the USB cable and ethernet cables matter too.  

If you want to go hifi then it’s either all the way or don’t bother.  This is a big boy game.  Count the cost before even starting.  I really didn’t think I would ever spend half the cost of my new speakers on amp power cords and speaker cables but that is what it took to get the sound I was after.