Why do digital cables sound different?

Maybe the differences in sound can be attributed to thick, heavy cables damping analog resonances on the transport or DAC. There may be mass-loading thing going on here. Also, its possible that in a high rez system and an undamped, sparsely furnished room, the cable may change room acoustics and wall reflections slightly.

the differences between digital cables may have as much to do with the cables as the listeners.

After 11 years this thread is still alive. I didn't read all the response but I try to give you my contribution. I think The hirez music could have impact on the digital cable position into the system chain. The high frequencies and the amount of bit resolution need of cable capable to maintain the impedence between entire path. So, I think which digital cable could affect sound not as well as PC cable, for example, but in consistency way. Recently I had to replace Stealth varidig with Oracle MA. The difference was not like night and day, but in term of "resolution ".

This is a topic that gives me a flashbacks to circuits 101, 35 years ago. It was a difficult concept to grasp, even after completing 5 Calculus and 3 Physics courses, but let's simplify it into one expression, dynamic change. Any time you change the signal characteristics the sound will be different; that is the inherent nature of sound produced from electrical pulses. Digital cables are required to be Impedance matching at 75 ohms. There is no exact 75 ohm Impedance, since it changes with frequency and can be altered by materials and construction. The acceptance of the change is in the ear of the listener as to what sounds better. Coaxial cables will have more variation for interpretation.

In my opinion, optical cables should be a more stable pulse. However, most listeners feel that they are to brittle sounding. This is probably true unless you have a very smooth tuned DAC circuit converter. This leads us back to your personal taste as to what is more accurate. Comments are welcome.

Lvhjr1, Optical cables don't have problem of jitter cause by reflections on impedance boundaries but rather from jitter being result of system noise affecting slow transitions (inherent to low slew rate of transmitters). Noise also affects transition of signal thru receiver's threshold (causing jitter) in coaxial cables, but much less because transitions are faster.