I love audiogon. It is a great, trusted, and reliable service. I have bought and sold a couple of items over the years. The forum can be a great resource, however I thoroughly enjoy reading these types of threads purely for the entertainment value. Absolute and total insanity!!!! My interest in home audio has evolved from buying mass market and then boutique gear to building my own amps and speakers. Not only is Radio Shack wire sufficient for most applications but thin, ugly, brown lamp cord from Home Depot is a great option as well. I defer to the Audio Critic and lie #1 from his "10 Biggest Lies in Audio."
"1. The Cable Lie
Logically this is not the lie to start with because cables are accessories, not primary audio components. But it is the hugest, dirtiest, most cynical, most intelligence-insulting and, above all, most fraudulently profitable lie in audio, and therefore must go to the head of the list.
The lie is that high-priced speaker cables and interconnects sound better than the standard, run-of-the-mill (say, Radio Shack) ones. It is a lie that has been exposed, shamed, and refuted over and over again by every genuine authority under the sun, but the tweako audio cultists hate authority and the innocents can’t distinguish it from self-serving charlatanry.
The simple truth is that resistance, inductance, and capacitance (R, L, and C) are the only cable parameters that affect performance in the range below radio frequencies. The signal has no idea whether it is being transmitted through cheap or expensive RLC. Yes, you have to pay a little more than rock bottom for decent plugs, shielding, insulation, etc., to avoid reliability problems, and you have to pay attention to resistance in longer connections. In basic electrical performance, however, a nice pair of straightened-out wire coat hangers with the ends scraped is not a whit inferior to a $2000 gee-whiz miracle cable. Nor is 16-gauge lamp cord at 18-cents a foot. Ultrahigh-priced cables are the biggest scam in consumer electronics, and the cowardly surrender of nearly all audio publications to the pressures of the cable marketers is truly depressing to behold."
