This is a great discussion about a subject that I believe continues to hurt the High End Audio Industry, that of its participants looking down on its marketing successes. It is not limited to Monster Cable. Look at all of the Krell and Mark Levinson bashing that goes on. This is the only industry that I can think of off hand that punishes its participants for having a business plan that includes marketing techniques that are utilized in almost every other industry that I know of.
Every cable manufacturer owes Monster Cable for the opportunity to have a marketplace to sell to. They should pay Noel Lee a royalty for every interconnect or speaker cable that they are able to sell outside of the interconnects and speaker cables that come standard in the box. Noel Lee was one of the, I would argue the most important, pioneers of the cable industry.
I attended one of his in-store sales meetings when I sold stereo back in the early nineties. To begin with, Noel Lee is a really nice, down to earth, guy. He understands that it is important to sell a customer on the notion that cables are a separate component. For this to be successful it is important that High End Audio Salespeople are trained in how to educate those who are not necessarily audiophiles. This education, in my opinion, opens the door for future members of our hobby. I know that it was a salesman who pushed me toward B&W speakers instead of the Cerwin Vega speakers that Consumer Reports rated highly that brought me into this hobby over 20 years ago.
As far as Monster Cable products are concerned, I believe that they are very underrated in the Audiophile community. Their high end interconnects and speaker cables are competitive with anything that is out there. You may like them more or less than other cables, but I would argue that they offer more more performance for their pricepoints due to the economies of scale of their manufacturing compared to smaller cable manufacturers. There are some horrible sounding esoteric hand made cables and some great sounding machine assembled cables. I have owned many different interconnects and speaker cables from various manufacturers and I have always liked the way that Monster cables have tended to sound in my different systems, full bodied. Not the most detailed cable, but not the least either.
How do Monster Cable detractors explain the performance of their power conditioners? What about their Entec line of DA Converters. Do you remember their highly rated and wonderful sounding phono cartridges?
I read Sean's post and I respectfully disagree with the idea that a twisted cable technology is necessarily superior to other technologies. As an example, Tara Labs and others have made exceptional solid core cables for many years. There are also many different variations of twisted cables. AudioQuest, Cardas, and Kimber are excellent twisted cable manufacturers that utilize different philosophies, materials, and manufacturing processes to create their products.
My last point is about sales incentives in the High End Audio Industry. Monster is far from the only High End Manufacturer to offer sales incentives. When I was selling in the industry Adcom, a respected high end audio company, had the best incentive program of all companies. They offered their products on a point system based on individual sales person Adcom performance. They were far from the only ones doing this. It is also standard for High End Audio Companies to sell their components to audio salespeople, reviewers, and other insiders for accomodation pricing, typically 50 percent of retail.
Just some thoughts on the subject.