It's Simple

+1 Almarg

In the end it boils down to the choice of components. 

Are the components high fidelity or not?

Are the components designed to give accurate high fidelity that is independent of the cables used and their length or not?

A setup that sounds different with every slightly different piece of wire is obviously NOT high fidelity - the sound is all over the place and totally dependent on extraneous factors which can never be properly controlled or determined.

@dave_b

It depends on the meaning of “high fidelity”. I interprete that to mean “faithful to the source recording” which means that “more twitchy it can be to the subtlest changes in the audio chain” is NOT high fidelity but “highly finicky”.

I understand that “high fidelity” can mean different things to different folks - a highly euphonic (distorting) tube amp may be marketed as “high fidelity” when it is really adding a great sound of its own circuitry to the recording...far from faithful to the original but a sound that is nevertheless highly desirable to those who enjoy it.

One of the world’s top mastering engineers (Doug Sax) used his brothers proprietary tube designs to master countless pop and rock - giving it just that touch of tube warmth that made his services in highest demand for decades. A high fidelity setup will allow you to hear what the mastering engineer intended.

@dave_b 

If “Everything matters and does alter the sound to varying degrees” wasnt such a gross generalization you might have a bit of a point.

@Dave_b  

Sure Dave, so happy you are fortunate enough to enjoy your “judicious ignorance”.

@ieales.

I agree with you 100% that the various recordings and masterings issued and manufactured may not be faithful to the original sound of the band. However a system’s degree of fidelity can be quantified in how faithful it is to the actual recording it is presented - no more no less. So there is such a thing as high fidelity and the higher the fidelity the less altered the sound should be!

Do you know of a good recording of Moby Grape - love that band?

Are you an engineer? You talk of L R and C but do you understand the relative impact that these factors play and do you understand how important component design is and component matching is in order to minimize any artefact from bits of wire....

@ideales

You clearly didn’t read what I said. I said faithful to the recorded music and NOT to the singers voice or sound BEFORE it reaches the studio microphone and is modified by said microphone. Nobody but nobody expects recorded music to reproduce the live event perfectly.

Sorry but you aren’t making any sense and your reading comprehension is poor. An appropriate plain cable or wire is not going to change amplitude or phase in any meaningful way. You have lost all credibility despite an appeal to your expertise as a designer.

”Involving the listener” is a meaningless concept and a bunch of hand waving - it can’t be measured and it most certainly isn’t high fidelity or faithfulness to the recording. 

@ieales

By recorded music I mean the final format that is used in a consumer system to play back. This is long after countless engineers have busted their asses trying to capture being in the room with the artist.

Faithfully reproducing the recorded signal at the output can be comparatively measured using test equipment. Another great qualitative measure (using our ears) on digital audio is to pass the recorded music from DAC to analog and then back to digital via ADC and then looping this a significant number of times. Each circle around the loop results in a small loss in fidelity. A higher fidelity component will be able to loop more times than a lower fidelity component before any audible differences are heard.