It’s all bullshit.
Obviously well soldered components made with quality raw materials are better than cheap materials assembled carelessly, but all that gold plated Silver coated vibranium superchakra stuff is bollocks.
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Na, cables just need to be rolled counterclockwise.
If you do it not that way the audio frequencies will get dizzy.
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Hype is what it is indeed. Just get good quality cables and you’ll be fine. No need for the fancy expensive stuff.
thousand dollar cables are no good, you need quantum stickers;
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I don’t know what this web page is on about but it is true that a sheet of blotter may impact your listening experience.
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It is mostly nonsense.
Cable construction does matter, but it’s not going to have drastic effects on your audio.
There’s no need to spend a lot of money.
It’s mostly about how well it rejects (obvious) interference/noise, nothing to do with “audio quality.”
And how well that cable stands up to abrasion etc (which may matter outside of a typical home environment).
A bad USB cable might be marginal and drop out/glitch from time-to-time, or not deliver its rated power, while a higher quality cable with lower gauge wire and ferrite chokes may not.
Better shielding may lessen the impact of audio cables running near power cables/power supplies, but the impact is usually marginal.
Switching to balanced audio connections—particularly cables using a Star Quad configuration—will do dramatically more for this than spending big on “fancy” RCA cables.
It also costs nothing to separate your audio cables from power, and ensure that they only ever cross over at 90° rather than running parallel, if they have to.
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For guitars, decent cable makes quite a difference, but all you need is a low capacitance cable and you’re good.
Otherwise, thanks to the nature of a passive guitar pickup circuit, the cable acts kind of like a tone control and removes top end.
They’re not expensive though.
I got a new record player setup a while back, and I needed speaker cables. I went to the local hifi store and the guy tried to sell me some €200-300 cables, when I know they do cheap, good alternatives. I laughed at him, and told him I’d get some mains cable from the hardware store. Which I did, and it sounds great.
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I’m about equally convinced by the audiophile claims, and the ‘Guy on the internet’, who apparently found no difference, listening in his concrete basement on a pair of krk monitors. It’s probably somewhere between the two, as it so often is.
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i just buy decent cables. workhorses.
voices in my head said that a cable should not cost the same as a synth it’s plugged in 
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Wouldn’t this debate be resolved simply by splitting a sound source, recording it through a cheap and an expensive cable, and then doing the phase invert test?
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for me it’s meanwhile the case that I prefer to buy stable cables because I’ve noticed that loose contacts or the like can occur more quickly with the cheap ones.
Things that mostly don’t matter:
- metal content of your cables
Things that do matter:
- assembly quality - good solder joints, good mechanical connections
- cable feel (studio) or robustness (gigging)
On the USB side, I find that
- Anker USB stuff is excellent
- so is Sabrent
- Cheap USB hubs and power adapters will pay you back with noise and hard to debug issues
General thoughts
- Learn to “flake” your cables. Coil them up so they lay flat by adding a half twist for each cycle.
- Avoid sharp turns. Use cables with right-angle connectors where appropriate
- Spend a few extra dollars on Anker USB-C and power cables
- I have 24+ year old Hosa and Radio Shack cables that still work great. Possibly because I take good care of them.
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Don’t need to go buy million dollar nonsense audiophile cables, but for my main monitors and microphone connections I’ll buy the $50 cables instead of the 10$ ones.
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No. The explanation long term: cable materials can be influenced over time and with usage. Higher quality cables will generally last longer and remain conductive throughout their lifespans.
Crap quality cables will peter out after a much lesser number of insertions/disconnects/etc. High end cables like Mogami will last very long due to their workmanship, materials, etc.
Had a friend who was an electrical engineer for RCA Corporation back in the day that spelled it out a lot better than I can, but that’s really what your looking at. Materials/build quality/durability.
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So true.
I’ve had some cables for 30 years.
Others only last a year.
I’d say avoid Hosa if possible.
It’s hard to resist their price, but every Hosa cable I’ve bought dies at some point. I prefer cables with a metal housing jack so I can repair them if needed.
That said I do have plenty of Hosa TRS cables and some have lasted longer than others. Their 14/" to RCA always seem to breakdown.
Mogami are nice, can be pricy.
As far as “gold plated” vs something basic, I have not noticed a huge difference in sound quality.
I do use some Nuterik balanced cables for my mixer to monitors.
They the “gold plated” kind.
For those specifically I do sense some difference.
Mainly because they are balanced.
What’s interesting to me is that from what I can tell, the guitar community, as @Mistercharlie indicated, has some rabid believers that high end cables produce superior results sonically to standard or even “good” cables of average price/build. Also, “mic people” seem to also feel that the higher quality the XLR cables are, the better the quality of recording will be.
Interestingly, some of the most expensive cabling is marketed towards those with inherent issues in that usb audio has been shown to be inferior in both fidelity of sound and also sketchy in the way it’s transferred, suffering from usb jitter and inherent issues of signal separation and cable grounding. However those same people with the biggest real problems to deal with are in some cases shelling out $1000 for a cable and $300 for a high end isolation dongle hoping to make their digital audio deck of comparable quality to standard hifi.
I don’t typically spend a lot of money on cables in general, but I was thinking I have a pretty nice guitar which I always play with a $10 cable and am I really losing tone through the umbilical cord… I mean of course I understand that cable length can add capacitance which can impact the sound of passive pickups, but even with my shitty back-up guitar which has active pickups I don’t know if I would ever notice a difference between a good cable or a bad one except that in the past I’ve had cables start to fail because they’ve been worked hard, not so sure it was because the cable itself was inferior.
I’ve seen a lot of videos of people scrutinizing audio played through 4 different cables, trying to blind test, doing a lot of squinting while they listen and on my end not being able to hear any difference due to possibly youtube limitations - I’ve also read articles where people who say “I bought all these cables myself and I can definitely hear a difference between these ones”, then also other people saying “I tried my printer cable and it sounded better than this $400 cable”. It just doesn’t seem that there’s a lot of science to back up people’s sonic claims/evaluations in these instances. I’ve also seen people on hi-fi forums get called out by other people saying “there’s a way to measure these things, opinions aren’t enough”.
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Mic and guitar cables run at much lower voltages than instrument level, also they can be long. It is at least plausible that spending more money on guitar & mic cables make sense. For synths almost anything that is competently assembled should do the job.
As mentioned above, when I’m using Sabrent & Anker hubs and power devices with Anker and CablesMatter cables, I have zero problems. Jitter is always going to be a problem with USB due to how the protocol works, but stepping up to USB3 seems to help. 
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Just to jump in the convo, but I also agree that no, cables don’t matter.
That being said! I only buy Roland or Boss cables. I love them. Same for the midi cables.
Roland all day. They feel good plugging them in and the winding experience is nice with the rubber insulation.
Am I foolish for winding over then under? To prevent the cable from spiraling inside?
I don’t know. Old habit from running yards of BNC cable when I was a camera assistant. For video monitoring of the film cameras for the director.
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This all brings up a question I haven’t solved.
USB audio always has noise for me. I’ve tried grounding everything properly. I have some fancy USB cables but still get noise.
May I should find another thread to ask how to solve that?