Quote Originally Posted by woodman
Any difference in performance between any two pieces of wire are one of three things:

1. One of the two wires is defective - not performing up to the level of which it was designed to be capable ... or,

2. One of the two wires has been intentionally engineered to alter in some way the signals passing through ... or,

3. The actual performance difference is gonna be too small to be of any meaningful significance. Claims by people that the difference is NOT subtle or small or insignificant are the result of their personal ABEs creating the sensory perception that they're experiencing.

I will definitely agree with you on number 2. Unless manufacture have in some way altered the performance of cable, then there shouldn't be any meaningful differences between cables.

For example, many exotic speaker cables that actually acted like a tone control, rolling off high frequency response due to excessive resistance and inductance (warm sound), while other cables make a system sound bright because of their excessive capacitance causing the amplifier to peak its high frequency response (detail sound).

But somebody might ask what is wrong with a cable that does alter the sound intentionally if it a make system sound better. And the answer would be...what about scenario where the recording we are listening to (since each recording have different equalization) have the same exact equalization or tone as the cable does? Then one will get double the warm sound (if record is warm and using warm cables), or double the bright sound of a system (vice versa)