I remember back in the day every one had to have those high end Monster cables. The audiophiles SWORE the sound was better. Except it was the frequencies humans couldn't actually hear. Just like 4K TVs now. Nothing really broadcasts in 4K, so you're really not seeing 4K anyway.
Yeah.....
Speaker cables absolutely do not matter as long as they can pass the power. My favorite speakers cables I've ever used were an orange extension cord that I cut up because I needed the system working and didn't have time to go buy any.
That didn't stop me from spending about $100 on speaker cables for my mastering rig. Why? They look cool. They're very nicely soldered. The heat shrink is cleaner than I can do. And I installed them several years ago and never thought about them again, and I probably won't until I move into a different room. They're not monster cables, though.
4K, OTOH, can easily be calculated based on your visual acuity. We have a 4K TV in our living room. The size we wanted and the distance from the TV to the couch was right on the edge of whether or not I could see any difference at all. My wife's eyes are a little worse than mine, and she can't. But, it also only cost about $80 more than an HD tv in the same size thanks to Costco.
4K computer monitors make a huge difference, though, as long as it's big enough. You've got so much more virtual area to put things in. You can see more tracks at once in a DAW as well as huge, well-rendered waveforms. And when you watch HD video, you can arrange it to take up about a quarter of the screen in native resolution and still do other things with 75% of the display.
I do wish that Windows and OS X would catch up with Linux in terms of subpixel font rendering and scaling different parts of the UI. On Linux, you can set it up so that all of the stupid window borders and useless UI elements take up basically no space, text is (relatively) big, readable, and so sharp that it never hurts your eyes. Windows and OS X's GUI scaling are both at least 8-10 years behind Linux in that regard. When 4K displays came out and were usable with computers, Linux already had the mechanisms in place to do all of that. The people who wrote xrandr really knew what they were doing.
My favorite computer setup was a 40" 4K TV just sitting on my desk. It felt like using 4 HD screens with no bezels. And an i5 laptop from 2011 with integrated graphics could run it (obviously not for gaming). I'm still waiting for Windows and OS X to catch up so I can have something like that experience with my studio computer, at which point, I'm probably going to put a 70" TV on my front wall....should be very similar. But, they're still expensive.
Unfortunately, I can't get away with that setup for music things....that TV set up like that really screws up the stereo image.
of course no but a guitar cable can affect the tone
Of course they do. The impedance relationships are totally different, and the math that shows that speaker cables, line level cables, and the vast majority of mic cables are all the same also show that guitar cables have a significant effect on the high end.
Lets not fail to consider the acoustic influence of the physical USB cable - if this cable is in the same room as the speaker/monitors; because that's the only difference it could make, as its function is entirely in the digital realm. While very few USB cables are dense and furry enough to act as a functional bass trap or cause noticeable phase shifts or comb filtering: they can conceivably affect some of the room reflections and diffusion: not so much that it could be heard or measured within the margins of error of today's technology: as impacts to the fragile harmonics and the subtleties of the crystal lattice remain below the threshold of perception for all but omniscient awareness. And the same applies to all the surfaces and cables, cases and food wrappers, and especially the helmholtz resonance of the waste basket; all the content of the room will have some influence on the acoustics: Even the butterfly outside flapping its wings and dreaming of Chuang-Tsu.
Hilarious. Love it.
This is actually one of the things I've been talking about in various threads on a couple forums lately...a lot of people obsess over things that either don't make any difference or make a demonstrably
tiny difference. But, they ignore things like the desk. A large format console or nearfields on most stands sitting on most "studio" desks creates so much comb filtering that you're never going to hear things accurately through that.
There are very few even high-end studios that really get that right. And just about every desk I've ever seen is too tall. I'm looking into changing my desk, and it looks like I'm just going to have to build something to get it right.
