There's never been any doubt in my mind that they make a difference, but I've always felt they were pretty subtle differences and I have focused more on the quality of the cable and connections and whether it was good for the application I used it in. More than anything, my main goal was to do no harm.
I've used some cables that degraded the quality of the sound, but haven't heard any in my system that made a big improvement.
That was until the other day when I bought some fairly expensive interconnects (used at a good price) and inserted them between my phono stage and preamp. It made a pretty noticeable improvement in sound quality and I have been playing a number of records I'm very familiar with and it's like hearing some of them for the first time. If it's all in my mind, well... whatever. I'll keep enjoying that placebo effect I guess.
I've used some cables that degraded the quality of the sound, but haven't heard any in my system that made a big improvement.
That was until the other day when I bought some fairly expensive interconnects (used at a good price) and inserted them between my phono stage and preamp. It made a pretty noticeable improvement in sound quality and I have been playing a number of records I'm very familiar with and it's like hearing some of them for the first time. If it's all in my mind, well... whatever. I'll keep enjoying that placebo effect I guess.