[rdale]

It doesn't mean that the cables or other equipment differences, can change the 'beats per minute' of a music track.

If the bass is reproduced poorly and sounds 'woolly' it will subjectively mess up the timing of the bass playing with respect to the rest of the music, as though the bass player is less skilful. Whereas listening to the same track with equipment that has tight, clear and dynamic bass can make the music sound more lively and subjectively 'faster', and it is more likely to make your foot tap.

[fennecfoxen]

> If the bass is reproduced poorly ...

Yeah, sure. But most of these comments are about cables carrying digital signals, a class of devices which only have two real operating modes: "working perfectly" and "catastrophic failure". Instead of respecting the principles of the physics and information encoding associated with this layout, though, we see outlandish claims of frequencies traveling at different speeds and damaging your multi-octave audio.

[rdale]

With digital audio going to a DAC even with cheap cables, the '1's and '0's should be arriving OK and will be in "working perfectly" mode. You have to hope that is the case with USB audio as there is no error checking.

But when bits arrive is very important in audio, and whether or not the devices and cables in the chain before the DAC have introduced noise on the ground plane is also considered very important by some.

I can't see how an ethernet cable can affect timing, as the packets with the digital signal might even arrive out of order. The earthing of the ethernet cable might influence how much noise is introduced the ground plane though. It might explain why the Audioquest cables are directional, if their earthing arrangement is directional perhaps.

[kabdib]

USB has error checking (there are checksums on every USB packet).

Isochronous USB has no error recovery (so if that packet arrives with a mangled checksum, you have a data dropout).

However, cables are the least of your worries; it's the driver stack (USB, ethernet, whatever) and the audio software feeding it that are the main sources of error. Unfortunately for Monster (et al) it is far harder for them to sell a $5,000 piece of software that does nothing than it is for them to sell a $5K piece of snake-oil-class hardware; the software is objectively analyzable without expensive tools, for instance.