So this comes down to the fundamental question of why is everything in music still so analog in this digital age? I was genuinely surprised when I first joined a band and found how archaic everything seemed to be. Even the terminology sounded vaguely steam punk. Condenser? You mean a capacitor?

I think historically, the problem was that anything that adds latency to your signal is bad news when you are performing. As a musician, any human-perceptible level of delay can throw you off your game, but there is also the possibility of unwanted sound artifacts coming out of things being slightly out of phase.

That said, I think things have come along far enough now that digital cabling could work on stage? They would have some advantages in that electrical noise would presumably be less of an issue with error-correcting protocols once the signal is in digital form? USB could be bad at the sampling point though if there is electrical noise in its power supply.

But I am not a sound engineer. I'm curious what others think about this? As a violin/fiddle guy, those 1/4" cables really weigh down the instrument and I think about this stuff from time to time.