Audioquest King Cobra - Genuine or Fake

Your conductors look to be the wrong colors

I'm not sure why someone would take the time and effort to counterfeit a $150 pair of ICs.

It's the same reason anyone counterfeits anything. $$.
$150 selling price; $5 cost of goods sold. R&D cost $0. Marketing cost $0. Gross profit $145/unit. Sell 1000 of them and you are talking real $.

To Tsugury,

The color problem does not seem to be an issue regarding the genuinety of the cables. I have been asking around and nobody has said anything about the color.

I would take AQ's claim of counterfeit with a gain of salt. I recall NBS tended to claim the cables not coming thru their own channel of resellers are all fake. They did that to me as well, when my system was using all NBS cables (several thousand dollars back in '90s, not a small investment!) I dumped all my NBS cables in protest.

Nevertheless, most counterfeit cables I see are from Asia, usually the premium priced cables. However, I would not be surprised if somebody would counterfeit a $150 cables. Google around and you'd read news on an Asian country making fake bun, fake egg, fake baby formula powder, fake American OTC medication, you name it.

But then again ... in United States ... we have people who claimed themselves expert DIYers, buy bulk cables from Home Depot or Lowes, then re-package them in fancy jackets et al and charge $$$ as giant-killers audio cables. Obviously legal. Doesn't make one feels better, however.

:-(

P.S. AQ's way of 'validating' cable is somewhat unusual. If you send the cables to AQ for authentication, and they think it's a fake, they would destroy it and not returning anything to you.