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

Now that is interesting and something I hadn't seen before. It is, alas, from 2013 when jitter was a more pressing concern than today with contemporary USB transports, but it does raise some interesting questions. I think it needs a retest!

@kirk9 
Thanks for the note, but what I was getting at was the idea that only current moves in any circuit voltages and resistances change but current is the only thing that moves because current (I) is the measure of electrons moving by a specific point in a circuit, a coulomb of electrons is 1 amp. 

I know this isn't an exact analogy but suppose you have constant pressure water source connected to a garden hose then connected to a fire hose then a 2 inch hose then a straw is the fire hose  (the expensive AC cable) going to make any difference in the amount of water coming out the end of the straw, the answer is no the water is limited by the resistance of the hoses in total not the resistance of the fire hose.

I understand AC hits a transformer then rectifiers change the AC into low voltage that works in your equipment, right there is never any music in the AC and this is a very easy circuit to design and it works great if your equipment is of any quality at all you will not need to worry about power. Don't get me wrong I've got probably 30k$ in power for my audio room but for other reasons, I live in Idaho with good power and only a few % distortion on the AC. The arguments with cables are a lot like the arguments with AC power yes, if you have cheep cables any signal will sound different, if you have bad AC it will sound bad because your entire system with be out of the limits the transformer and rectifiers can handle, this is not what the normal audiophile dealing with comparing 1k$ cables and 5k$ power conditioning equipment. 

@jea48 
I had a panasonic 3700 but the one made for portable recording, I got into so much trouble with it because it could never hold sync, the way the time code and the sample rate were derived didn’t work. Back then 35 years ago there were a few different TC rates depending on what you needed to sync to if it was a film camera the Panasonic was useless. A few years later HHB and Fostex came out with DAT recorders that derived their sample rate from internal clocks and not dependent on sample rates. Panasonic recorders were never a standard in the film industry after the 3700. Yes the machine was really bad full of jitter and out of sync signals because it was a flawed machine in any test any scale and in every way.