Fancy materials and weave patterns can definitely have measurable effects. Everyone who’s done some physics or electrical theory training knows that. It’s just that the differences aren’t significant in the context of a headphone listening situation. But many manufacturers like to blur the lines on that.

As other commenters have mentioned, all cables aren’t perfect just because there is an upper limit of useful performance. You can definitely still find cables that will perform more or less sub-optimally depending on the application. Back in the olden days, rubbish cables may have been more proliferated.

Placebo is an important factor when dealing with subjective or intangible things. Add on some cultural prestige (being in the right in-crowd), and it gets messy. The fact of the matter is that if we listen to two cables that are identical, or create a tiny difference through impedance or wherever, then we will hear the difference that we expect or want to hear.

But there is also the feel-good factor. If getting a cable that is made of exotic materials and is designed and made well makes you enjoy listening more, then it has arguably done its job. Just like a comfy chair makes the music sound better, without actually changing the sound. As long as you don’t tip over into delusion and total financial irresponsibility, then I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with it.

In summary, it’s not as simple as many people would like to believe, and there are cores of reason to all delusions. You mentioned burn-in and it might very well have mattered on older transducer designs. It’s certainly something you might need to deal with on vacuum tubes.

Years ago I was at a Electronics show in London and got chatting with a rep from Quad HiFi and wanted to know what the sexy orange speaker cable they were using was. Turned out it was regular power cord with the plugs clipped that they had managed to buy a bulk lot from a Electric Mower supplier. I’ve not used anything else since then, and laugh at those that drop a wedge on cable and connects.

copium and schizophrenia

As far as burning in headphones go, I don’t think it’s bunk at all. The data signal through a wire being better or worse can be bunk, but it depends on how much resistance is occurring in the cable…not likely enough to affect sound quality.

But with actual animated components like speakers, there could be benefits to wearing them in (burn in). Anything that moves will eventually wear out. A car engine requires a break in period because components are new and can loosen over time. Same goes for the diaphragms of speakers and the voice coil that moves back and forth on a magnet. Over time the material that makes up the diaphragm can loosen up and alter the sound produced.

When the voice coil moves back and forth on the magnet, it can smooth out microscopic pits and grooves making the voice coil freer to push air more efficiently.

It comes from confidence artists taking advantage of the cognitive biases that we all possess and lay intuition about how this stuff works.

Science aptitude isn’t a common, and music is evocative. Blend that all together and it makes fertile ground for criminals to run wild.

It comes from audiophiles being mentally challenged and thinking they can hear better because they’ve spent a fuck ton of money on equipment/gear

Our brain prioritises visual information over audio information, leading to things like the Mcgurk effect.

What we see can change what we hear, so people could see a copper cable and think ‘this now sounds warmer’ etc - the brain has been told that so it thinks that - just like how the same sound/word over a different video of a mouth moving makes people hear a different word.

Different to a placebo effect, and way more interesting if you ask me!

Other people want to try to justify the $$$ they spent on an expensive cable. Besides microphonics and looking pretty there’s not much else a cable can do.

Not sure about the max but certainly there’s a minimum quality cable you need. I’ve absolutely had RF noise coupled into cables before.

I don’t particularly know where it comes from.

But, I have actually experienced something in a way with cheap off the wall Skullcandy headphones a long time ago (take it with a grain of salt). This was before I found the space and ended up with V-MODA Crossfade M-100 master that changed my listening experience.

I was once gifted a pair of Skullcandy Lowrider on-ear, they had a detachable TRRS in-line mic cable. That cable sucked, one day that cable started catching this static sound that got annoying. So I scrapped the in-line cable and bought a regular TRSS/TRSS AUX from I think Ugreen on Amazon. That cable made a subtle but noticeable difference in both volume and sound. I wouldn’t say it completely changed the soundstage or anything like that, but the headphones did get a slight bump in volume and also the sound was a little more defined, nothing drastic though. The low end sounded tighter and there was a slight bit of instrument separation effect because of it too because they didn’t completely sound blended together like a muddy mess as before. By comparison of what I have now those headphones are shit.

My theory on that was that the newer cable most likely had higher quality shielding with better material conduction for the input connection and the trrs connections, without any mic in between meant there was a more secure connection and signal passthrough being delivered with a secure contact connection from end to end as the original cable was in-line trs/trrs. But the input in the headphones cup could also take trrs.

I also play guitar, though instrument cables work a little differently in this area since it’s analog rather than digital signals traveling.Quality makes a difference. Cheap cables affect tone and pick up electrical interference that translates to unwanted hum, in some cases just touching it would cause it too. Higher quality shielded cables will eliminate the hum, length also matters here as shorter cables produce better sound due to having less signal loss than longer cables. That loss in signal can actually be felt while playing because there’s milliseconds of latency making guitar playing not feel as snappy and immediate the moment a string is hit.

So ideally for headphones, I think maybe for some a cable might make a subtle difference rather than a drastic one if the original cable is poor quality …or it might not make a difference at all. There’s variables to take into account too, but I’m not a sound engineer to get into the whole science of audio and cables, this is just my hands on experience with some things. By relative theory, what I think …could also just be complete shit by another’s personal perception experiences and scepticism. Naturally I wouldn’t hold it against anyone either because audio tech science is weird.

Because if you pay a few grand for the same cable everyone else has and don’t blind test with a large audience, you are going to imagine very minor improvements to satisfy your mental health.

This hobby is like almost all other hobbies: if you have the means to afford the highest of the high end then go for it. If you don’t have the money then get what’s best for your budget. I have cheap cables, I have some of the AliExpress speaker wires and I have a few higher end cables. I cannot tell the difference if I’m being honest. My favorite cables I own are the AliExpress speaker connects because they look incredible. Two 10 foot runs cost around $28. If the speaker placement in my listening room didn’t expose the speaker cables then I’d just use copper wire though.

Where on earth does speculation about a cable changing sound stage and tonality and technicality even come from?

Someone’s ass.

I even saw a thread where a commenter was telling someone that once they find the right cables, they need to experiment with “changing solder, wire direction, etc. because every single thing makes a huge difference.”

Irrationality is a very human thing.

We’re incredible pattern matching devices. 8 billion faces out there and all unique and we can detect the minute differences between them, even brothers who look very similar can be very distinct.

So we’re fantastic at patterns. And if there are no patterns, we invent patterns.

There’s also placebo, where - after we’ve invented the pattern - our brain is more than happy to confirm there is such a pattern. We know it’s a more expensive cable, so then we know it sounds a lot better. And then our brain agrees it sounds a lot better.

Humans are just not rational and we’re certainly not objective. And then someone claims cable A is better, because reasons. Person 2 hears this and is inclined to believe person 1. Boom, now two people are saying it’s better.

Analog signal? Sure. The quality of connections and how well the contact is made as well as the length and type of wiring, you could build an argument for the signal being affected. It might not be an easy or practical argument, but it could be done

Digital signals? Nah. It’s above the on threshold or it’s below the off threshold and that’s it. You could maybe got hard about how the signal on-off changes might not be perfectly square which leads to the transition from off to on or visa versa being delayed, but that’s a flaw of the receiving end and where the clock reads the wire.

I don’t want to outright dismiss the snake oil because I can clearly hear the difference between MP3 and FLAC, but I got in a conversation on the iPod forums with someone who swore they were listening side by side on the spot and could not tell any difference. That’s why companies are able to market products that are well past most people’s diminishing returns, their is always that doubt that you haven’t discovered something yet.