What makes the biggest difference in sound quality?

When you can get risk of the noises everything become dead quet all you hear was pure musical presentation!

The headline itself doesn't mention pre or power amps. So, overall, what makes the most difference to a system is the source. If we talk about items mentioned below the headline then it's interconnect cables.

This is based entirely on the fact that once musical detail is lost or otherwise distorted it cannot be retrieved further down the line.

That’s a very long cumbersome way to express your belief that cables have zero impact to the performance of any audio system. And since you are also of the belief that “we hear what we want to hear”, I take it you never tried (as in listen) for yourself?

Well Sir… When I put different ones in and moved them around, it did not make much difference.
I sorta-kinda thought that maybe the emerald AQ ones sounded better, but then later I moved them to another component and put in some homemade ones, and it sounded just as good.

It is really hard to A/B these quickly. The best I have been above to do is put different cables on last and right, to at least try and hear whether the image shifts etc.

But my interconnects are now mostly Mogamo with Neutrik ProFi ends. So they are pretty good for home made.

On the speaker cables I have tried AQ, Mogami, and lamp cord… No real head snapping differences… But the lamp cord seemed better bi-wired. The speaker wires/cables are not really able to be A/B compared in any easy way. So if our auditory memory is short, then it is prone to being difficult to accurately assess it.

I can believe that power cords could make a difference, but it is not like I can hear any noise coming through.

How is one suppose to listen and be sure that they are not being fooled?

The headline itself doesn’t mention pre or power amps.

True, it was just cabling.
No room treatments, or anything else either.
(I admit, it is easy to miss read the question to what we wanted it to ask.)

This is a thread with a 140 posts, from people that have years and years of hands on experience at the topic on hand, and in comes a bumbling blow-hard know it all, and proceeds to emphatically claim that everyone here is delusional, and his 5 dollars interconnects, and 20 dollars lamp cord sounds no different than any and everything else.

Starts talking about delusions, and fooling yourself etc etc etc....

I don’t get it......it’s like a fly in an ointment, a cockroach in a soup, such a productive conversation derailed by a deaf audiophile. These people should take up photography.... if you cannot hear tones, timbre, pitch, resolution, staging, separation, etc etc etc maybe music isn’t really your thing ?

And if I was half deaf, I definitely wouldn’t go around proudly advertising it.