Who thinks $5K speaker cable really better than generic 14AWG cable?

Still amused immensely by this topic, here,s my 3 cents of old fart musings!
Hail from England originally and grew up as a cash strapped music afficondo making do on a shoe string budget to begin.
Back in the 70,s, affordable meant Jap amps and cassette decks, JVC, Trio, Akai, Aiwa etc, all made fair offerings for the price, hard to beat  garrard turntable for the price and with a half decent cart sounded good enough. Speakers were ALWAYS English, Mission for the masses, Tannoy or Mordaunt Short for those with a bit more cash.
Anyways knew a lot of similar minded folk and we would trade gear, tell tall stories etc but not once EVER did anybody even think about cables of any sort!
You used what came with your gear, yes those throwaway rca cables, whatever power cord came with it and hopefully you could persuade the dealer to throw in some speaker cable if you bought a new pair, remember getting some QED 14g cable with some new Missions...which I still have...lol.
I think if anybody had suggested you go blow the price of your tape deck or amp on interconnects or power cord or fuse they would have been laughed out of the country!
Now maybe we were all ignorant or just did not know any better, who knows, all I know is I am still constantly amazed at the price of some cables and the people who buy them.

Anyone who know ANYthing about cables, knows that once you move them, it takes a while for them to ’settle’ again. A ’blind test’ done by switching cables out, one after the other, is the height of futility and absurdity.
It’s not the cable, it’s one’s level of sophistication and knowledge. Now that there are a zillion cable around, whereas there used to be only 3 or 4 top brands that dealers carried, people walk in and want to hear "X" or "Y" compared to each other, one right after the other. This is dumb, but not necessarily the consumer’s fault. The dealer fails to educate his client base and with the short attention spans people betray, it’s no wonder someone feels like this.

Clearly few people remember the Stereophile Carver Challenge, when Bob Carver tried to duplicate his amp to make it sound exactly like certain tube amps. As pointed out, it was absurd to expect people to be able to discern differences in a matter of seconds or minutes.
When I move my Shunyata cable around and listen - and voice is ALWAYS better, because most singers stand right at the mike. Wiat, let me qualify that: OLDER recordings with well-recorded singers (Ella, Nat King Cole, Sarah, Eileen O’Farrell, Callas, Leontyne Price), will do the trick. Using those recordings, I can move my cable and hear the loss of hard consonants (words ending in "d" or starting with "p" because, especially with a word starting in "P" the sound creates a sort of "aspirant." Just say the word "push" out loud: there is no way to say it without, literally, pushing air out of your mouth, whereas the word "thought" does not "push" air out. So, move the cable, play Ella Sings Cole Porter, or even music up to say, 1970, and you can easily hear the aspirant disappear. Leave it for an hour and try again. You will now hear the aspirant.

Cable are not rip-offs: people merely have incompetent dealers, more interested in selling than in educating their customers, and simply saying, "lets let this sit for 20 minutes or so" because the customer may simply leave.
Flowers don’t grow because you throw water on them: they take time. Nobody rushes a flower to bloom, or a foal to walk. They do it in their own time.
Cables also need TIME to settle. You don’t have to buy new ones to test this knowledge out: do it on your own system. Same with power cords (especially Shunyata because, I think, of the way the cable is woven. But I can hear it on my Nordost as well). And I buy from places where I can return the item if I don’t hear a sufficient increase in sonics. And many is the time I haven’t hard enough to warrant the purchase. But blaming the genre as a rip-off? You need better ears, and a knowledge of how live music sounds (or at least something that has not been multi-mixed at a console).
So, instead of "fake news," try acquiring something that you can put in your own system and do it the correct way. Insert. WAIT. Then listen.
Whereas, the listening experience used to be a relaxing one, when brick and mortar  establishments were the standard of the day - and dealers had actual knowledge - you could, assuming you knew anything - trust your ears. Now? The dealers are mediocre,  and their setups are poor. A nearby dealer has top of the heap electronics, and the worst setups, and yet he sells tons of ARC, Nordost, and others. Yet, he has no ears. I have a suck out around the lower treble, yet I can easily tell when something is wrong. In his setup,  it's ALL wrong. 
Bad setup will cancel out hearing what the equipment (including the cable) can do. Do you know the equipment well enough to assess the cable? One wonders.

You have to listen to something in order to ascertain something. It cannot be done on the fly. It takes time. Swapping out cables in a blind A/B test is nothing more than a parlor trick meant to beguile.

"Cables need to SETTLE."  Really...now they need to settle?  Is that after they are burned in?  Before they are "elevated?  Holy Moly!  I am still chuckling at the comparison with flowers growing.

gbmcleod-

nice point of view and I concur that most dealers/retailers have poor sounding rooms.  Happy Listening!