Yes, cables do make a difference -- regardless of price...

Why do you think that people looking at cables haven’t already spent many thousands on acoustics? System synergy? Room dimensions? It’s pretty stupid to by a $200k Porsche and put  $50 Toyota tires on it. When you spend thousands, tens of thousands or more on a system, why not audition cables to get the most out of your purchase. Every cable has a different sound, can be good, can be bad.

But if you have a cheaper system/cheaper car, cables/tires aren’t going to make a big difference. You can only get so much out of a cheaper system or a cheaper car.

I commonly hear people say that they want their system to sound like the "real thing".  But of course that is never going to happen since you do not know what the "real thing" originally sounded like.  What you mean, I suspect, is that you want it to sound like your interpretation of what you think the "real thing" should sound like.

@crozbo It helps a lot to use recordings you made yourself, because you were there when it was recorded, huh! 😀

If you even get a chance to try equipment that supports AES48 (which is likely a bit more expensive) I'd be interested to hear if you still hear the same differences.

When the standard isn't supported, the shield of the cable becomes the signal return path, just as it is in an RCA cable. So its more susceptible to noise and the construction of the cable itself. Not only that but you lose immunity to ground loops. Cable immunity and immunity to ground loops are two things that the balanced line system is supposed to eliminate, along with reduced noise (Common Mode rejection of noise; CMRR).

So if the standard isn't supported, you're likely to hear cable differences. I think this is why the single-ended vs balanced thing is an on-going thing in high end audio since so little of high end audio equipment supports the standard.

I know that cables make a difference sometimes but the acoustic treatment of the listening area always makes a huge difference way more than any cable . I had a set of transparent audio reference cables for many years and I must say that benchmark media speaker cable did not sound worse or different.

Cables make a major difference with the effect increasing with your systems ability to resolve but with power cables I think it’s much more physics with build quality and wire gauge than with interconnects. I’ve yet to hear a better resolving $300-500 12ga cable beat a <$40 10ga cable from Amazon on a power amp. Some make it sound “cleaner” but it won’t allow the amp to pull out as much detail and richness. It just makes it sound more analytically clean and sanitized with less detail. Need to step up massively in price (15x+)to get the same or better performance with 10ga+ equivalent cables. This is on a mid-$10k’s system with a $8500 power amp and ~$20k speakers connected by ~$1k speaker cables. Just stupid how much many cable companies charge for their jewelry.