It was obvious why the original poster bo130 said what he did. I answered him in a straightforward way as if his posting was a simple direct statement taken a face value but the real purpose of his posting seemed to me was to discredit people who brought any real knowledge to this board and who don't agree that upmarket cables make an audible improvement in audio systems. In other words, he is likely a shill for someone.

Those of us who have been around in this industry whether as pros or as hobbyists for any time know that there are an infinite number of clever ways to trick people into believing something about some piece or kind of equipment or other. How do we know? We've been tricked many times ourselves. My favorite was the Little David, a speaker marketed by Phillips in the 1970s. And a clever trick it was too. It was at a trade show. Two monster speakers were set up in a large room. They were playing jazz. Loud. Big sound just like the sound you'd expect from a gigantic multiway horn system. Dozens of people were crowded in listening to them. When the presenter started to talk about Phillip's new offering, at one point he turned on the lights inside the enclosures. It revealed to everyone's astonishment including mine that the enclosures were nothing more than empty frames with cloth around them. The actual speakers were very small, tiramplified bookshelf speakers. I have a friend who owns the original demos in his collection. This is just one example. There are countless others, most of them with far more malevolent intent. Even scientists can make honest mistakes as evidenced by the demo some Japanese experimenters published last year that was cited on this board. They demonstrated what they knew to be impossible was true, that you could hear harmonics above 20khz. When they realized and corrected their error (a tweeter covering both the audible and ultrasonic range producing harmonic distortion in the audible range when excited in the ultrasonic range) they got the right answer. The point is that to make a credible claim and convince professionals that they are valid, you MUST publish you complete experimental method and hold it up to scrutiny of other people of equal skill so that they can review it and shoot it down if possible. The audiophile cable industry didn't do this. Having produced products much more expensive than those they replaced, it was incumbent ON THEM, to prove their merit, not on the industry to prove they had none. For the longest while it seemed obvious that they didn't because they apparantly couldn't. But now it is also obvious from their commercial success that they don't have to. Audiophiles are willing to buy them and accept their worth often sight unseen and unheard. But even if they do prove that they work differently then their more mundane competitors, that is not enough to satisfy engineers who need to know how to know what they will do in advance (not as tinkering experimenters with unlimited time and money to try anything) and to know that what they have to offer is unique and cost effective. This is why engineers have a built in advantage over non engineers in gaging the validity of the increasingly brazen claims the people who make and sell this stuff publish.

This board offers neophite audiophiles the opportunity to question not only which cables to buy but the validity of the notion that they have to buy anything out of the ordinary at all. Other sites such as Cable Asylum take it for granted that upmarket cables are a necessary part of a fine home sound system and do not permit discussion of one important type of test, the Double Blind ABX test (DBT) which is a method scientists have of eliminating prejudice when trying to compare different equipment.

It is not the people who are skeptical like me who engage in technobabble about audio cables, it is the people who make and sell them, trying to impress and confuse their prospective customers intimidating or scaring them into believing that they won't get all of the performance they paid for in their other equipment if they don't buy these products. It is sad when someone with $500 to $1000 trying to put together his first home HT system or stereo system has been persuaded to shell out another few hundred for cables. Those people who are convinced that they must have these products will NOT be persuaded by objective facts that they might be wrong. But they will not go unchallenged if they bring their unsupported claims here either. Meanwhile, after reading PC Tower's notes from the recent CES show, it is clear that whether anyone in the industry believes in them or not, you are not going to successfully market high end audio equipment without impressive looking after market cables in their demo installation because that is what audiophiles expect to see.