Unimpressed with Mogami cables

quality of stereo image also highly depends on speaker placement and room acoustics.
 
if you have better cables, you may get a cleaner sound and some of the intereference of the room (reflections which were previously hidden by background buzz) may now be more audible.
 
i would stick to balanced cables you got now and start looking for the next cost effective part to improve. i don't know your room, but unless you have it laid out symmetrically and already seriously treated in terms room acoustics, there is room for improvement ... and that would be the place where I put my money next. (BTW I'm not talking about auto-EQ software like ARC ... )

JonD
...What type of Mogami cables did you get?  What type of connectors?...

 
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/151500307554
 

Rather expensive for a couple of short cables, that....

Guitar/bass leads aside (they need to be low capacitance and resist handling noise very well) there's little to choose between inexpensive cables and the most expensive. In audio terms, anyway. And even for guitar/bass there's nothing any better than George L's, Planet Waves and a few others in the same price range. The idea of a cable "tuned" for jazz or metal or whatever is pure woo of the kind used to persuade wealthy hi-fi obsessives that they really, really need a gold plated pure silver power cable to "provide a purer power supply to improve the treble/bass/clarity of their system (and please ignore the miles and miles of steel, copper and aluminium cables that connect your house to the generators)".

I can't easily imagine why switching from unbalanced cable to unbalanced in itself would have a negative impact on sound quality. It's likely the interface and monitors handle balanced and unbalanced differently with regards to amplification and impedance, but if anything balanced should lead to an improvement, in noise levels if nothing else. Though with cables that short unless the environment is very electronically noisy even that may be a minimal gain. For stereo imaging to suffer seems unlikely, or at least I've never noticed cables making a marked difference in that.

Really, any two-core+braid cable terminated with ordinary Neutrik, Switchcraft or similar connectors should be up to doing a good job. No need for fancy wire either. Oxygen-free copper (OFC) is worth the slight (if any) price difference because drawn copper normally contains free oxygen which over time corrodes the cable from the inside, which is why if you strip the insulation off old cables you'll sometimes find the wire has turned black. Fancy, enormously thick, over-complicated wire isn't needed either. And as for "directional" cables, erm.... we're dealing with alternating current here so ignore that sales pitch. The same goes for solid vs twisted wire. There is a difference between how solid and twisted cable carries a signal, but only in radio frequency ranges well above the audible range.

I'd suggest picking up a couple of inexpensive but not cheapest of the cheap "budget" cables and seeing if they make any difference. It's always worth having spare cables about anyway, in my experience money spent on leads is rarely wasted in the long term.

I'm with Bit on this one. The Mogami stuff is pretty standard in lots of studio's and outboard rigs. You could check the cables with a multi-meter and see if there's a high resistance on one of them, but I'd look at the monitors to see if the output trim and EQ settings are equal. I use much cheaper cables in my setup and they don't effect the stereo imaging. If you have reduced noise then it's a win, time to play with placement and speaker settings.

i use canare cable.
 
http://www.canare.com/
 
 
i have each of my mic and speaker cables custom made at a local shop,
it's almost as cheap as buying horizon cables off the wall at GC...
 
 
i DO have some mogami cables too, but in direct a/b'ing them against each other,
same lengths and setups, 
i find the canare is every bit as good, if not slightly more clarity, than the mogami,
which is supposed to be superior.
 
this is my personal experience only.

JonD
...there's also the possibility of a problem with your monitor XLR port.  (Since you were using  the quarter inch inputs before).

 
I'll check that out.

I'm no expert on cables and such but when I connected all my gear with Mogami cables all when quiet. Noise was gone. I even use Mogami cables for guitar etc. Not cheap cables for sure and maybe not the best but they are very good and I feel worth the money. I think your hearing your monitors clearer now as was mentioned. hopefully they are not damaged in any way. Hope you work it out.