I'm mostly far too lazy to be arsed with cable comparisons. Several years ago, I replaced some freebie cables with the then AoS flavour of the month cables. The FOTM cables sounded much worse, a finding that was greeted with disbelief here on AoS. Earlier this year, however, I swapped in a spare set of VdH cables in place of the set of freebies connecting my headphone amp to the preamp in the upstairs system, and the difference was immediately noticeable, and represented a considerable improvement. So, yes cables can and do make a difference, but different doesn't always equal better.

In the downstairs system, by contrast, swapping around interconnects seems to make relatively little difference (but there's effectively only one swappable cable anyway, between the CDT and the amp/DAC, so not much scope for experimentation).