In my experience, which is admittedly narrow (as in, I am not a product reviewer, retail dealer, etc so I don't handle thousands or tens of thousands of products a year), monoprice cables tend to fall apart/fail at a fairly high rate - they just seem cheaply put together. This isn't to say inexpensive is explicitly bad, just that I've never had good luck with monoprice as a brand. Belkin, Hosa, and Amazon's house brand ("Basics") all seem to be more reliable IME. Just my 2c.
I've never experienced such failure rates but I don't buy nearly as many USB cables from them as I do Ethernet. Typically, a bad USB cable isn't hard to identify and replace. At monoprice.com prices, you can afford to replace quite a lot of them before you even reach brick and mortar prices for their cheapest cables, much less the ridiculous $500+ cables.
I used to do a lot of networking tech support. In particular, I ran an awful lot of Ethernet cable and troubleshooted more complex networks and cabling issues than most people would ever want to even know. So, I have a bit more experience with cables than most. Even so, you don't really need to be an expert to know that digital cables either work or they don't. As long as the cable is 100% functional, it will perform identically to any other USB cable regardless of the price tag or materials. Of course, a cable can be damaged or poorly made to the point it does perform badly but I've never had such problems with monoprice cables.
If there's any point worth mentioning, it's how well a cable holds up. The only possible problem outside of a damaged cable is interference from nearby powered cables or power sources. Even then, that mostly only applied to analog audio cables, specifically telephone cables. Telephones use the same type of cable as computer networks but you almost never experience packet loss or packet degradation over a local network, while cross-talk and other such problems are a real thing for analog telephone networks. This is because computers use digital signals that are much more resilient to interference. That said, it's not recommended to run them next to higher voltage lines because the shielding only holds out so much interference. So, while interference is possible, it's always the result of either poor shielding or poor placement of cables. If anything makes a difference in the quality of a cable, it's how well it is shielded, not whether it's made of gold, platinum or exotic materials.
"I would really like to read the results of these test. Could you please post a link?
Thanks"
There are a number of studies but this was the one I was referring, in particular. Be sure to look into their further reading since it was more than just the one article. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/340-audiophile-ethernet-cable-gets-a-marginal-pass-on-the-test-bench/
They did an entire series of news articles covering over priced cables and whether they make a difference. They were reasonably thorough about debunking the super over priced cables. While there are some bottom priced cables that don't actually pass the required standards for USB, every cable I've tested from monoprice passed every test they claimed they had passed. I know because I have the cable testers to prove it. It has been a couple years since I've bought a cable from monoprice but I would be super surprised to hear they dropped their quality given how they try to appeal to professionals and not just amateurs/hobbyists. I've bought multiple 1000 foot cable spools from them over the years and numerous pre-made cables of assorted lengths, because I didn't always have the time to make my own cables, and had not one problem. They've never been top quality but they've always been more than "good enough" for large corporate businesses, as long as you don't do something stupid like run the cable in parallel next to a high voltage power cable.
"Sorry wrong link posted :atsmile:
http://positive-feedback.com/audio-discourse/why-usb-cables-can-make-a-difference/
..."
That article seems like misleading click bait to me. I had to stop reading after skimming the first part. They neglect to mention that any decent hardware will have plenty of suppression against interference from other parts of the PC. Even then, it'd either take significant interference to matter to a USB cable (or any other digital cable) or the USB cable would have to have shielding so poor it doesn't meet USB standards. That's not to say there aren't USB cables that are made so cheaply they don't even meet USB standards. You definitely should be at least a little choosy about not getting some off-off-brand that doesn't have proper shielding. Again, I've never experienced such problems with true monoprice cables but there are cables sold on amazon (though, Amazon brand cables are usually well shielded) that have improper shielding. If you are truly concerned about interference from your PC, you could make sure that the signal stays digital until it is a fair distance away from your PC (at least a couple feet) and converted to analog externally, such as a receiver or DAC (which I believe the Op already has.)
There is a reason a lot of USB power cables come with those noise suppressors attached to one end of the cable. Power can and will interfere with any device/cable that is not properly shielded.
So, to reiterate,
as long as the cable is not damaged and is properly shielded, it doesn't matter if the cable cost $1 or $1000, it will do the exact same job.
With all that said, I will admit that there is always the potential of having bad luck and getting a bad cable even from a good brand but this applies to nearly all brands more or less equally, with exception for the truly bad brands. Though, getting something bad from a good brand is more often the result of poor shipping rather than poor QC. The poor shipping may not even necessarily be between the vendor and yourself. It could be between the manufacturer and the vendor or any point between yourself and where it was made. Buying directly from a manufacturer can mitigate the risk of shipping damage but it would take either extremely poor packaging or extremely poor handling for a cable to be damaged in shipping (not that it doesn't happen frequently.)
Edit: I forgot to mention the audiophile cable tests done by Ars were related to Ethernet cables but the testing is relevant to any digital copper cable. If it's true for Ethernet, it's true for USB, HDMI and any other copper digital cable. The only difference is the specifications on shielding and how far the cable will carry a signal before it degrades.
Edit Again: I forgot to mention that Monoprice does
NOT sell cables or anything else on Amazon. If you bought Monoprice anything on Amazon, it was either a fake or a 3rd party reselling the cable on Amazon. In the case of a fake (the most likely case,) then you're not even talking about Monoprice cables. In the case of a 3rd party reseller, we're talking about cables that were shipped from Monoprice to the 3rd party and then shipped to you, at minimum. There's no telling how poor the handling was for the cable during it's extra time in transit or while in possession of the 3rd party seller. I would absolutely not trust anything tagged Monoprice and sold on Amazon.
