[mrob]

Cable quality can make a difference for instruments with passive pickups, especially with long cable runs. A guitar pickup can have >10Kohm output impedance, so it doesn't take much cable capacitance to get audible high frequency loss. You can solve this problem with a buffer amplifier close to the instrument, but that's one more device that can break or run out of battery charge.

[mveety]

It's not just passive pickups, it's all analog signals. Analog signals can degrade quite a lot of a run of shitty cable.