Balanced cables

@audiozen

Many folks simply want to believe cables make a difference - many because they spent a quite considerable portion of their budget on nonsense tweaks.

You will never get these same folks to ever admit they were fools or suckers as W.C. Fields put it.

Furthermore, the mark up on cables and silly fuses and silly contact goo is in the thousands and therefore an army of unscrupulous sellers and resellers will rush to attack anyone who says “the emperor has no clothes”.

Worse, if you look at the sales supporting the economic model of this website you will see a significant percentage is in nonsense tweaks - so moderators are not going to lift a finger to kill a lively business of parting fools from their money....

Nonsense tweaks are to audiofools as expensive rejuvenation creams are to the vain and superficial...

The ferrofluid probably dried out in your midrange and tweeter. This happens after as little as 2 years depending on use. That would explain the metallic sound. Are you the sole owner? It doesn’t take much to damage those drivers - a bit of clipping even at modest power will heat the voice coil up immensely...

Just last year I bought a $3,100 XLR cable.
Seven meter Kimber KS1116

For that money you could get a preamp with high output (around 18 volts vs the regular 2 volts). A better higher output component will be unaffected by either the type of XLR cable and/or length. Usually it is interconnect capacitance that affects weak low cost consumer (low-fi) gear resulting in less dynamics. RCA is terrible but of course no serious audiophile would ever use RCA. 

Again it is sad to see folks misplacing blame on interconnects when it is the components that are at fault for any audible degradation.