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Out of interest, what do you base your comment that HP cable quality does not matter as much on?
Headphones tend to remain relatively stationary for their entire lives, as well as not inducing severe microphonics on the wearer. This allows designers to focus on the quality of the headphone itself, rather than a physically robust cable that does not convey vibrations. The quality of home made cables tends to be very far off the quality of factory made cables, due to their nature. Just having a massive 3.5mm jack is a significant disadvantage already, not to mention the cabling and braiding methods they use.
The amount of subjectivity and twisting of words annoys me in threads like this. The annoying becomes apparent when my posts become deleted because this forum is extremely vulnerable to trolling.
First of all, there is no way a home made cable is 'built better' than a factory made one. The whole 'shrink wrap strain reliefs' and large, heavy connection points and added weight are all unfavourable characteristics for durability. How someone could see the opposite I do not understand. The only place I've seen a real cable consistently fail is the joint between the jack and wire of the UE earphones. That is mainly because the sleeving is extendable while the core wires aren't, causing intense strain on the solder connections if wrapped up.
On the comment on 'don't fix if it's not broken', it seems that you have associated the words 'upgrade cable' with 'superior to stock' in every way.
Looks - Although looks ARE subjective, a degree of objectivity can be reached when a large third party is called in to give their opinions, namely, normal people. When lots of people think your upgrade cable looks 'home made' in a derogatory way, it suggests that anything we audiophiles in general think about the look of custom cables is isolated to ourselves (tested with only a teenage demographic, who DO think beats look good). I'm in the group that says 'function is all where function is desired', except I have the teenage urge of 'it has to not make my friends vomit'. You won't see your custom cable on an iem. Others
might. Either way looks are a horrible reason (if it's not the only reason) for most things, but if you do want to count them, count them as neutral or bad.
Build quality - I invite anyone to dispute the IE series cable as one of the best (and the UE ones as the worst). The UM3x does not have a single custom cable. The IE8 has about three. It took 4+ years for the makers to consider demand (or low cost of extra materials) good enough to make them.
The whole point of designing something is integration. If whatever you're making doesn't at least function menially with itself, then it's already a failure. Your cables are built with many different parts, but they are built as one. The joints, the cable and the connections are all integrated to form one solid (to varying degrees) product. When you try to create something out of many different pieces that
weren't designed specifically to be together in the formation desired, it is usually inferior to one that was. The simplest and most universal analogy in my opinion is lego. You buy a lego set and it is designed to fit together perfectly. You buy a mechanno set and try to make it look like the lego set, and it might get close, but it will be inferior to a whole design.
Sound quality - come on....
krismusic - To make my stance on cables clear, I think it is viable that silver makes a
difference from copper. I am not implying anything else, but I will say that, if given a choice, with all else equal, I would pay $x extra for a silver cable. x will be based on the current price of the headphone/iem and a few other financial factors. If I could, I'd own gold cables. Yeahhhh.
