Hi StevenSurprenant, I hadn't checked this catagory for a long time, thanks for the kind words. I'm afraid the whole cable war thing will drag on nearly forever. As an EE I have every reason to doubt the technical aspects of cable differences, as an audiophile I can not ignore what my ears tell me.

Take a cheap boom box, place it in different locations within a room, the sound quality changes. Now step up to a better system, to get the most out of that system, speaker placement becomes far more critical.

As the listener climbs up the sound quality curve, he soon learns that room treatments matter. It can be as simple as closing the drapes or as exotic as buying specialty products (corner traps, bass traps, absorbers, diffusers etc.). Many of these products can be home made or purchased at often exotic prices.

IMHO the whole price thing has little to do with ego or status, it's that the better audio products on the whole are more expensive.

As the determined listener continues to improve his system, two things tend to happen; 1. He gets better at hearing small changes and 2. as the system quality improves, ever smaller effects become discernable.

What I'm saying is that the differences between cables will not be heard with a boom box in a cement bunker, but as other components including the room improve, at some point cables will begin to make an audible difference.

It is unfortunate that the magazines on the whole resort to hyperbole when describing cable differences, "Wow, I never heard such a gigantic change". This isn't really true, but when all other attempts to improve the sound quality have reached a practical limit, it may seem like the cable change is huge. This is mainly due to the fact that all the other changes have stopped offering any useful additional improvement.

Some cables offer immediate and obvious differences, smear or muddling as opposed to hard or harsh seem common. Other cables have far more subtle effects, some take days of listening to many sources and kinds of music to reveal themselves. All this is made worse by another controversial subject called break in.

Double blind testing can be made valid. The problem is that in spite of wha the magazines say, most cable differences take some time to identify. This makes a usefull DBT so lengthy that many can't or won't bother. It is also my opinion that DBT tests can not be done by commitee, more than two listeners would make it nearly impossible to agree on what to listen to and for how long.

For me, hearing the difference between a good Kimber interconnect and a good Cardas interconnect is pretty tough, but hearing the differnece between either of these and a cheap Radio Shack interconnect is fairly easy.

The CD became popular because it sounded better than that old $99 record changer with ceramic cartridge we all used to have. Yet todays $25,000 vinyl playback systems sound better than a CD, all this proves is that good sound reproduction is a collection of subtleties.