WHY CABLES MATTER!

The 3 primary things that affect cable sound are capacitance, inductance and skin affect followed by materials like; jacketing, connectors, solder.... Not every cable designer uses the same amount of each.

Several years ago I was gifted WireWorld TOL series 8 prototype speaker cables XLR interconnects, and mid level power cords. Overall they did not make magic in my system at the time. Eventually, I replaced all of them with Ali-E Odin II gold knock offs which sing better. I also upgraded the CD transport and power cords from the lessor WW PCs to a huge sonic improvement. at some point I will reinsert the WW X>R and speaker cables just to test how I feel with them now.

Or as one the posters stated EVERYTHING MATTERS

hth

@audioisnobiggie 

I use hardware calibration for my monitor. My software tells me how accurate the colors my screen puts out are. If I swap digital cables, it shows me a different measured result

That's very interesting! Is the difference easily visible as well? Is this issue with cables a well known phenomenon in the video industry? I have a new TV that has far better color than I've had on previous TVs. I have it hooked up to various devices and haven't noticed a difference in color if I watch the same Apple TV show through my Apple TV box or directly off the TV's built-in app. I haven't looked that closely but they look very similar, close enough for my eyes. I know there are differences in color perception. My parents couldn't tell if the color was way off, and that surprised me. I can tell if it's way off but maybe not if it's just a little off. 

@cleeds

They’re not interested in conversation - they seek to disrupt it.

We’d love to see just some decent explanation of what’s going on. I’d be happy with some simple measurements. If there’s a subtle but reliably measurable difference in speaker output between the two cables, that’d be enough to convince me, and we’d have a solid explanation of what’s going on. I would expect the cable manufacturers to provide this data on at least a small selection of amps and speakers, not a task for end users. Although, I have a calibrated mic. and REW so I can do those sorts of things. I have done it with amplifiers, but never felt a need for cables because I never thought I heard anything. If there are important differences, these can be described by the cable specifications, just like the parameters on a speaker driver.

This article answers my questions. Cables can definitely make a difference. I don’t see why they need to cost a lot, but you may need a specific mix of resistance, inductance, capacitance with any given system to get a most desired result. In some cases you need some resistance in the cable to protect the amp! In my opinion this should never be the case, but I'm sure some will argue that making a speaker behave like that somehow makes it sound better.

https://www.passlabs.com/technical_article/speaker-cables-science-or-snake-oil/

@invalid 

I've had Polk sda2a speakers for over 30 years

I had that same speaker. I bought mine back around 1991 or '92. I liked them but didn't tend to use that crosstalk cable. I didn't understand how it was supposed to work and so I honestly never noticed the SDA effect. Many years later I set up my own SDA arrangement using four bookshelf speakers and it was highly effective. By then I understood the concept and knew how to set it up and what to listen for, but no longer had the SDA speakers. More recently I've used 3 speakers to get the same effect, mixed L-R, L+R, R-L. This has once again been done with little bookshelf speakers, but I just bought a 3rd horn tweeter so I'm on my way to getting it set up in a fully horn loaded arrangement.