A butt-load spent in cables - how much improvemt?

You never need apologize for conducting your own back-to-back tests of what works best for you. If you put the old cables back and are pleased with the results, you can re-sell your expensive cables and save a bunch of money. If you find the expensive ones sound better, you can give yourself some peace that your money was well-spent.

While hardly unique to high-end audio, we can apply enormous psychological pressure to ourselves to conform to others' expectations. Heaven forbid that we not be sophisticated enough as trained listeners to not hear "obvious" differences! People we don't know might whisper behind our backs about our being country bumpkins or such.

It is very difficult for us to separate advertising hype, fads and fashions from what we really hear. However, I wish more people would do what you've proposed. Haul out the old stuff and do a reality check - compare it to the new. Then choose the one that makes sense to you.

Note that none of this requires you denigrate the one you don't pick. You are not writing your thesis for your PhD, nor are you declaring what is good and noble for the world at large. You're simply choosing some wire for your stereo.

Seasoned wrote (regarding audibility of cables): "I wonder if those who can't [hear] don't have their systems set up correctly...."

While there were some softening modifiers added afterwards, I think this is the type of comment we need to avoid. While not in-your-face, the clear insinuation is that if you can't hear a difference, there must be something "wrong" with your system.

There are a lot of variables that impact how a systems sounds. Your room may be plagued with RFI and mine not. You may have a poor connection at an electrical junction box buried in your wall a couple of rooms away and I may not. Your speakers may be more reactive and present a difficult load to an amp sensitive to such issues while another system is more stable in this regard.

And we haven't even got to the psychological issues yet or the fact that different people do not prioritize the importance of various audio cues in the same order.

The goal is that each of us ends up with a system within our budget that makes us happy, not the other guy. To that end I think we need to remember that our choices are nothing more than that - ours.

Tbg wrote > "I certainly would not go so far as to say cables cannot elevate the sound to a higher level of excellence. Does this not imply a zero improvement?"

Perhaps just an issue of semantics, but a cable is not an active component. It cannot "add" anything to a signal; there is no amplification or gain and it shouldn't be shaping the frequency response or other signal characteristics.

What a cable can do is take things away; it can fail to accurately transmit the signal. It can allow EMI or RF interference to distort the signal. It can change the frequency response. It can fail to transmit the full signal strength. But it cannot make the signal "better" than when it left the source component (unless you count on the cable's deficiency to be an inverse match to a defect elsewhere in a system.)

Of course, that is an interesting approach, build a system based on combining defects and substandard performance. Not the approach one would typically think to take, but there is room for everyone in this hobby. ;-)