Who are the most underground high-end companies

Taters, I've paid dearly for due diligence. When I finally swore off the high-end (I should say high-advertised) stuff was when I paid air-fare to fly the Vandy dealer over here to "adjust" the 5AC speaks, drove 90 miles each way to the airport and back, bought him lunch, the whole smash. He spent all of 10 minutes with some Radio Shack gizmo to "centre" the Vandies and the rest of the day trying to push some $8k speaker cables on me. We did a swap-out with my Blue Jeans and I found myself, in my own damn living room, apologizing, that I could not hear a difference. Then I had to drive him back to the airport. Took me about a week to realize I was very angry, and started looking in to how this stuff is made and through the channels it is sold. Like I said, find out how hard it is to talk to the guy who actually makes the stuff, and deal directly with him/her. It has cost me at least 50 large to realize that for under 10 grand you can get the best sound out there, American built, and it will just tickle your ears.

I suspect a lot of folks don’t find differences between expensive high end cables and modestly priced or even cheap cables but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any differences, perhaps even big differences. It just could mean the experiment was flawed somehow or the system didn’t reveal the differences or the listeners were not as skilled at detecting differences as they perhaps believe or that there was a problem somewhere in the system. Or the cables were not installed in the right direction. No offense to anyone intended. Certainly differences would be expected to be smaller if the cables were not broken in or the cables under test were unplugged and plugged back in without sufficient time for the electro-mechanical interface to get properly reestablished. That’s why it’s sometimes a good idea to take any test results with a grain of salt or even throw them out, often they’re just outliers. That's also why The Amazing Randi feels quite secure offering $1 Million dollars to any senior audiophile who can hear the difference between expensive high end cables and Monster Cable in controlled blind tests.

I second yogiboy. Quicksilver is outstanding gear, and the people are great to deal with. A pair of Mid Monos is on my bucket list for upgrades.

Deja Vu in McLean VA is indeed unique. I've both obtained gear there and taken others there to marvel at the unique gear and listening setup. Great shop, would love to see more like this.

Hey brethren, I’m not saying one outfit’s gear is better than another’s. But electrons move in a certain, defined, predictable and unalterable way. Along that way their passage gets corrupted whether by tubes or silicon or wire resistance and capacitance. So it's your choice of which distortion you like best. But over short distances in a home system these factors are hardly, if at all, measurable. AB comparisons are nigh impossible in a show-room, because of the many other variables objective and subjective. A louder amp or a more efficient speaker will almost always sound better. All’s I’m saying is, get rid of as many middle-men as possible and you will come out ahead. That’s simple math. Checked your hearing lately? I bet if you’re 50 years old you can’t hear much above 4 or maybe 5 kHz, so why pay a premium for stuff that on a test bench with a scope can turn out 100 kHz? Inter-connects, i.e. speaker leads and the co-ax that connects everything, are just pushing electrons down, or rather outside, a pipe. The rest is snake oil.