Человек, придумавший этот стандарт вам как бы говорит:
" yes, USB cables do sound different. They shouldn’t but they do. He says the reason is because most manufacturers are unable or unwilling to make their cables with the correct 90 Ohm impedance and be able to pass up to a 2.6 GHz perfect square wave. He says that unless those two parameters are met, the USB feedback mechanism doesn’t work because reflections get the signal confused on the computer end. Without it, there’s no way for the computer to know that it’s sending the data at the proper rate and bits get dropped. Since USB receivers have no error correction (this was news to me) a dropped bit gets interpolated at the DAC, and distortion increases. He says that this situation is not helped by the fact that Windows, including Win 8, generate 12% more hard errors in a digital audio bitstream than does Apple’s OSX! He also says to play your computer audio directly from memory for lowest error rate on either platform, and if possible, keep your music on a Firewire, eSATA or Thunderbolt drive rather than USB.
So, If you want your computer sourced digital audio system to sound it’s best, find a cable manufacturer that will guarantee his cable’s impedance at 90 Ohms* and that his cable can pass, ideally, a 2.6 GHz, or at least a 0.5 GHz perfect square wave (seems like a pretty high frequency to me), and that your music server runs OSX rather than Windows.
*Gordon also told me that virtually NONE of the cable manufacturers out there have any way of measuring the impedance of their cables and many believe that a lower than 90 Ohms is preferable because it allows them to sell longer runs. He says that because any deviation from 90 Ohms (higher or lower) is damaging to the data stream, lowering the impedance of the cable doesn’t work. Also, an apps engineer at Belden just told me that most cable companies buy their actual wire from suppliers who will customize things like sheath color and dielectric material, and it’s possible that many suppliers supply essentially the same cable to multiple audio cable makers."
Научных исследований никто не проводил. Другее и подтвержденнее данных нет и не будет. В учебниках вряд ли появится в ближайшем будущем.