Therefore, expensive cables aren’ts as important also.
Oh how I wish this were true!
I argue this with ignorant people on a regular basis. I can even hear the difference between 0.5 an 1.0 XLRs of the same mfg
I've made this point before on other threads but it bears repeating here: If the equipment used with the cables supports the balanced line standard (AES48), then the interconnect cables will not impose any important sonic artifact.
The proof of this is simple: if you've ever heard an RCA or Mercury recording from the late 1950s, the microphone signals of those recordings were passed through some very long (+100 feet) balanced line cables. This was before any exotic interconnect cable industry existed; quite literally the balanced line standard in use at the time **was** the exotic cable technology!
For some reason, the balanced standard is mostly ignored in high end audio. We made the world's first balanced line preamps for home audio and at the time (1989) it didn't occur to us to not support the standard. After all, if a method of making interconnect cables be absolutely sonically neutral and inexpensive, you'd think audiophiles would be all over that.
But almost right away, other manufacturers began making balanced line products also, and we saw that the standard wasn't being supported. Part of this was probably because to do it right you need an output transformer (or you do it the way we did it, but we have two patents on our technique, which is direct-coupled). I suspect that the marketing department thought that would be a hard sell or they didn't want the cost in the product. I don't know; I've never asked. But it appears that some manufacturers don't even know that there is a standard.
At any rate, if you don't support the standard, differences in cables will be audible, which isn't how its supposed to work.
