Will a quality USB cable make a difference....

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It is obvious that the first 2 responders don't have the system or savvy to hear the difference.

Just kidding, like was pointed out above, you will never get the answer you seek by asking that question. When you ask these cables questions, if you get enough responses, some will respond that they hear huge differences and some will say they hear none. That means the only way to tell is to try it yourself which basically means all threads of this type are worthless except as a means to waste a little more time on these forums.

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I don't see where the audio industry guy's position is relative. We're concerned with playback, not recording. They use many devices and techniques in the studio that don't apply to home listening. For instance; some argue that balanced gear is a must for optimum performance because that's what studios use when the truth is a studio is a very different beast due to to the sheer amount of equipment, the electrical noise, the extremely low level signals from the microphones, and the interconnections between all of the gear.

In fact, most recording engineers and artists don't own audiophile systems and are therefore the last people I would seek advice from about setting up my system.

Going back to my original comments; by my count we have 6 that say no difference and 4 that say it does matter. Like every other post about any kind of cable it always ends up like this and the bottom line always ends up that you have try it for yourself.

A thousand more people could post with their findings but you still wouldn't know until you tried it.
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I especially enjoy those who dismiss the possibility it is the cable yet make unsubstantiated guesses like "I believe that most of the sound effects that are erroneously identified as jitter are in fact the result of elasticity buffer stack overflows" or "I believe that most audiophiles can't discerne jitter (w/ USB2), and wouldn't know what it sounded like even if if they could."

BTW what difference does it make whether or not they can identify the source of the distortion as long as they can hear it. I bet you could inject an audible level of measurable distortion like THD into a system and most couldn't tell you what it is and furthermore wouldn't care as long as they had a way to reduce it.

So to sum it all up, yet another gigantic waste of time. I could search the archives and come up with hundreds of threads exactly like this one. The engineers can't explain it so they refuse to believe it exists while others don't care a hoot about explanations as long as they are convinced they hear it.

Oh yeah, and once again it has deteriorated into a pissing contest between the two factions. Who could have seen that one coming :>)

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