Harley quote

@djones51 - if you want to select products based on the way they measure, that's certainly your (and anyone else's) prerogative. Personally, I'd rather choose products that sound good to me, regardless of what the measurements say.

Measurements can be a useful engineering tool, but they are only useful to a point. Measurement technology continues to improve like everything else, and our understanding of what measurements are useful and important also changes.

Just as an example, whitecamaross has been publishing youtube recordings of his system with different amps and cables. I suspect these amps and cables measure almost identically, yet even listening through cheap earbuds on an ipad from youtube, you can hear the difference in the way they sound.

So what measurements are causing this sound difference, and how would you figure out what measurements to look for to get the sound of one vs the other?

I have no idea if there is a sound difference caused by any component in a YouTube video. First I would want to know what controls have been implemented. They need to be level matched within .1db or 1% or one will be louder than the other and humans have a preference for louder. 

djones51,  please, read the book. One of the statements made repeatedly by Tim Clarey, the geologist author, is that the rocks don't lie. The record is there, right under our feet. The petroleum industry in its thirst for crude and gas has charted it all out as they poked thousands of holes into the land and oceans. 

Flood: NOT imagination, but supported by study of sedimentation, plate tectonics, hydrology, and other sciences. 

So, let's not play the game of marginalization by attempting to declare what I am discussing as "imaginary".  

+1 to the comment from @jaytor 

" If a particular listener prefers one product over another, that's ALL that counts."

I've been listening to 5 USB cables with the express objective of figuring out how little I can spend on a USB cable and still get music that sounds good to me. Several of the cables were loaned to me by a friend and the less expensive cables were purchased by me. The cables were:

Generic HP printer cable: Free with printer (I found it still wrapped in our drawer of computer stuff)
Belkin Gold: $15
Pangea Audio Premier SE: $50
Shunyata Venom: $100-200
Phasure Lush: $253

The cables were connecting a Pro-ject Stream Box Ultra S2 streamer and a Denafrips Ares II DAC.

I started listening with the Shunyata Venom cable as a default of something that is widely mentioned as being decent in sound and did so for two weeks. I burned in each of the cables for about 100 hours before listening seriously (streamer, DAC, amplifier all on but with volume turned down). First, I wanted to hear the generic HP printer cable as the extreme case to understand whether cables make any difference at all.  That HP cable sounded so awfully bad that I lasted only about an hour with listening to that cable. My specific impressions were:

generic HP printer cable:
Sound feels shut-in and veiled.
Trailing edge of notes have an overhang.
Treble is a bit harsh.
Bass sounds tubby. 

A brief synopsis of my listening notes on the other cables was:

Belkin Gold: Not bad at all in isolation, but lacking a bit in richness and detail versus the higher priced cables. I had high hopes for the inexpensive Belkin as it was a former The Absolute Sound recommended product in 2013.
Pangea:  More detail than the Belkin, but also somewhat harsh in tone and a bit congested in sound (more detail, but detail was not easy to understand)
Shunyata: Very solid all around (detail, smoothness of tone, timing, fullness of sound)
Phasure Lush: Unfortunately (as this was the most expensive of all of the cables) this sounded best of all. It did everything as well or better than the Shunyata Venom cable but also had conveyed a beautiful, organic sounding tone quality for acoustic instruments and voices, but still conveyed the edge in Kurt Cobain's voice better than the Shunyata and Pangea cables.

Perhaps the most telling takeaways for me was that even though I had five cables that I could use, I ALWAYS wanted to go back to the Phasure Lush cable. I'm listening to Trevor Pinnock playing Bach's The Well Tempered Clavier on harpsichord and thinking/feeling just how beautiful this sounds. I can say that with different USB cables, the Ares II DAC was definitely more/less listenable & more/less enjoyable for me. Can that difference be measured by the equipment and measurements that current science is aware of? Maybe...Maybe not. Would I rather spend my time listening via the Phasure Lush USB cable than the other cables I tested? Definitely.