Who says cables don't make a difference?

Buzz off 🍑 🎩 

Exupgh2,

I see a lot of you “pro-boutique cable” guys seem to be content that cables sound “different”. But I see very few posts that say that their boutique cables sound better than what they were using before, just different. My question is this: do you cable swappers assume that the higher the price the better the cable will sound? Or do you rely on blind chance and hope that your new cable sounds better than your old one? How many audiophiles just look on expensive cables as merely bling? I ask because I really don’t know. While I have tried a number of expensive interconnects and speaker cables that have been loaned to me, and have, of course noted that many of them impart a slightly different “flavor” to the sound, I’ve never heard one that I found actually sounded better than what was there before. I also noted that the differences disappeared (in my consciousness) after a couple of days.
Right now, I have an AudioQuest USB cable between the MacBook Pro that I use as a music server in my main system, and my recent build “Mark Ii” Yggdrasil DAC. The USB cable is borrowed and is black and has a 72 volt battery hanging off of it which is connected to the cable only on one end of the battery (IOW, not a complete circuit). Initially, I noticed that it sounded a bit different from the “printer cable” quality USB cable that I had been using -not necessarily better, you understand, just different in ways that I found difficult to quantify, or indeed identify. It’s been in my system for several months now, and I no longer notice the differences. I suppose that I will notice the change again when I go back to my “printer cable”. Actually I prefer SPDIF for digital between server and DAC over USB. I suspect that SPDIF has a lower error rate than USB, but I don’t know that for certain.

LOL, I use the USB cable that came with my integrated amp. I don't think digital out sounds any better than USB anymore. It's simply my subjective opinion. I always used and thought coax sounded the best until my most recent foray into using USB. I think it's improved a lot the last few years for audio. 

I love the smell of cable threads in the morning.

Now cable breaking-in threads ... that's the smell of napalm.  

But I do notice some improvement.  Before it was like "cables don't make any difference ... blah blah blah".  Now at least the difference is acknowledged to the tune of "difference but not worth the asking price".

I have a dream that one day cable-break-in will be accepted like one their own.

Like any audio component cables should be considered a Black Box when attempting to find the impact on SQ. But this can be vexing as cables and power cords need time to break in, otherwise what’s the point. It’s not what anybody wants to do - wait a week or two to find out what the cables sound like. So there’s that. Then, after the cables are burned in, what is the cables’ impact on noise and distortion, frequency bandwidth, dynamics? This can be a very long process, trying to decide which cables to use. Perhaps you just buy the cables you fell in love 💕 with, maybe at a show or a rave review, and live with them. Sure, that’s one way to do it.