Lol one thing I've always found interesting is when people upgrade cables and don't change the wiring from the interconnect to the driver and all the wiring in their amps to. So basically all they're doing is adding some "better" wire in between and if that makes an improvement then why not just make an interconnect coupler with silver in it or a wire crimp with silver
Because in some cases, there isn't enough room in the enclosure for some thicker strands of wires to be stuck inside.
Plus the effect does "stack" up.
I think the point is that it doesn't actually make an improvement in these specific situations, and people saying it does in these situations are perfect examples of cognitive dissonance. I'm not trying to open up the huge cable debate can of worms here, but clearly if there is a bottleneck which is the interconnect wire between the cups which will degrade the "amazingly awesome signal" the $1,000 cables are providing, there can't really be a completely noticeable improvement.
I always wondered the same thing. For headphones that only require one cup plugged (meaning there is an interconnect between the two drivers), why bother upgrading the cable if you're not going to upgrade the crappy stock wire inside the headband?
Scientifically, it would make a difference.
Any conductor in real life is an imperfect conductor, so it has semi-insulating properties as well, and in that case, it would have stray resistance, capacitance, and inductance, which adds up to the impedance of the headphone.
Now some argue that these stray reactance should be in a range where it does not and should not affect the overall properties of the headphone, and I'd say... they may be right, but would they affect the electrical rig they are plugged into? I'd argue... maybe.
The electrical components that we have are also not their perfect cases, so in some cases, these small differences may add up and cause them to shift their control characteristics ever so slightly, but just enough for there to be a shift, and then things start to sound different. Looking at the datasheets of some electrical components would easily reveal that they will start to distort, sound bad, or potentially act up with very small amount of something wrong to be in front of them. Because... again, they aren't perfect. That's why amps in real load conditions (when actually connected to headphones) may behave in a different manner as opposed to when they are measured with a dummy load (essentially a "perfect" headphone). And that's also why some amps are designed with high output impedance, because they may not be stable at lower output impedance, or they may introduce other types of issues into the audio band.
The cable itself may or may not make the difference (physically and scientifically, it does), but the electrical components (amp, DAC, DAP, etc...) driving the headphone may "react" to the cable, and that will account for the difference in sound.
I'd argue that the "difference" people hear is actually as a result of both, because without one, there can't be the other, and so on.
So to summarize, I think, and I do believe that: different cables have different physical properties that can be measured consistently. And sometimes these differences can cause the electrical system driving the headphone to produce something else... That's the objective look at things. Subjectively, I believe there is a very small difference that a cable can make to the sound of a headphone, which is not going to be noticeable depending on what you plug the headphone into, and even the headphone itself.
