What type of cables make the most difference

@8th-note 

Thank you for sharing your experiences. What is the equipment you are using. The effect is highly dependent on your system. There is a place to show photos and ID your components. Which is really helpful for forum members to understand where you are coming from. 

Have you ever borrowed some really good cables or interconnects... for instance something in the $2K range? Cardas, Transparent, top of the line Audio Quest. I have found that cables and interconnects in the shallow end often are just not very good. I think Nordost is known for this. Their high end stuff is spectacular, like the Valhalla up to Odin 2 are striking, but the lower end are pretty unremarkable. 

As far as silver vs other. The character of the sound of inexpensive intereconnects is often very material driven... but high end ones are not... all the components have been carefully chosen and any deficiency in the metal are offset by other materials, geometries and other factors. 

Signal cables deliver the most noticeable tonal impact. While this difference may fade into the background over time, the underlying quality always shines through.

Power cables free components from performance constraints. High-quality power cables allow your devices to operate with consistent excellence, creating a positive ripple effect across your entire system.

Speaker cables can choke your sound if chosen poorly. Selecting the right speaker cables is critical to unlocking the full potential of a high-end audio system..

8th-note, I appreciate your explanation of the trouble you have hearing differences in cables. I have a few suggestions based on my principles for building superior systems. 

Ignore break in or settling. You will not be able to ascertain reliably a difference in sound over longer periods of time. To the others on this thread, I am not interested in arguing my advice. 

Second, work with entire sets. There are confounding variables such as two different brands of cables which are made similar, i.e,, similar conductor and AWB, which will sound similar. The characteristics of cables are far more discernible when used in sets. A great deal of the arguments about cables could be laid to rest if people would compare sets rather than individual cables. 

Finally, regarding your claim, "I think it's very enlightening that nobody has produced a controlled ABX test that shows that listeners can identify different cables when they don't know which they are listening to. If anyone on this thread knows of such a test please provide a link," you are speaking with a reviewer who voluntarily subjected himself to ABX using the Van Alstine ABX Comparator. I included cables in the testing to see if I could reliably select the proper cables, and I did. I am forbidden as a reviewer to put a link there, but you can find the article if you conduct a search for "Douglas Schroeder Van Alstine ABX" or similar.

If you come up with excuses why you will not accept my findings in the article, then know that I have no interest in debating my findings.  

The answer is none. They all sound the same, save your money and just buy decent quality and you’ll be fine. When people start talking about $100 apiece you’re getting taken advantage of

@douglas_schroeder I took the bait and googled "Douglas Schroeder Van Alstine ABX". I found tube equipment tests that you passed, but no cables. Different sounds of tubes are rather uncontroversial.

So the statement of no passed ABX tests for cables stands. A fortiori, as those results were posted on a message board, not published in a peer-reviewed journal. The latter is still the minimum standard for scientific demonstrations. You would also need to provide p-values for your results. For instance your 5:3 results have a p-value of 0.6, so are utterly non-significant. Even 7:1 is not significant. Only 8:0 is, at p = 0.02, but will have a significant Type II error associated with it because of low sample size. And as you did multiple songs, the multiple comparison issue arises as well (Bonferroni correction). But I digress ...

@raysmtb1 +1