Along these lines, I recently moved and have been expanding and upgrading my audio. As a secondary system, I got an inexpensive Sony 5 disc CD player, Yamaha 5740 receiver and hooked it up to some 14 year old Mirage M 260 (not OM 260) speakers that had sounded pretty good for my budget with a Denon receiver and CD player at the time. The new Sony CD player came with an optical audio output, but no optical cable, so I hooked it up with the 2-channel cable provided. When I got a chance to hook it up with the optical cable, it sounded much, much better. I then upgraded to Axiom M22's with a Velodyne CHT-8 sub and now it sounds about 95% as good as my Polk (RTi8 Fronts, CSi5 Center, FXi3 rears, Velodyne CHT-12 sub, Harman Kardon AVR 230 receiver) home theatre system. So the questions are:
Are the CD players today that much better, but only if you use optical audio connections?
Are the optical audio cables really that much better?
Both?
Or am I actually just listening more closely and the improvements with upgraded connections and speakers are just wishful thinking? Because it really seemed that the cable change did more for the sound than the M22s (although they seemed to improve things as well).
