Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
In a badly designed system they won't, amps that cannot drive a reactive load properly will ring and sound bright, a high impedance potentiometer used as a passive volume control seeing a long cable with a high capacitance will sound a bit duller. Basically I think people are using cables as not very good and very expensive tone controls, and how is it that recording studios are quite happy using standard 600 ohm balanced line cable, if you look at a studio catalogue it cost peanuts to buy in comparison to "hi-fi" cable, if it was no good, all recordings would sound awful. Has any one seen an album with the words "all balanced cables in this studio are made from six nines copper and are connected according to the arrows".
About right.... in the few cases where cables do make a difference it's due to basic electrical properties of the cable interacting with source and load impedances.. This has nothing to do with the money spent on the cable or their "quality". If equipment is used correctly and designed correctly you won't hear any difference with cables from different makes (so long as, with speaker cable, it's thick and short enough to rule out FR changes due to cable resistance). That's all there is to it folks...