why do people feel the need to buy expensive cable


I have tried expensive cables and one's moderately priced. I would say there were some differences but I can't actually say the expensive cables were better. IMHO I believe a lot of people buy expensive cables because they don't actual trust their ears and are afraid of making a mistake. They figure the expensive cables are better for the fact they cost more. If you have a difference of opinion or share the same thoughts, I would like to hear about it.
taters
It’s case of small runs of custom and sometimes quite unique manufacturing.

You can’t have exclusive impossible to find products (compared to lets say a salt shaker, or keyboard, or coffee table) somehow priced as a mass market item.

As well, costs change. They do it all the time. Ie, one batch of raw materials may be twice the cost of the old when the new arrives at the dock.

It is not unusual to get a new price sheet from a supplier, where you need to put a seat-belt on your office chair before you open the PDF file...then see the new numbers (50-100-200% increases) and suffer severe shock to the mind and heart all while your orifices contract mightily. This has been the way of the manufacturing world for at least the last decade.

Some materials are eliminated and have to be bought on the second hand market, or bought in massive bulk, before they are deleted as a catalogue item.

Eg Charles Hansen of Ayre talked about how many transistors they had to buy before a certain item was deleted, and Nelson Pass had to pay a quite serious sum to have a custom run batch of SIT transistors made up for him by southwestern. Seemingly minutes later, southwestern closed their doors (bought out/shut down). Similar thing for many others.

In our case, it is a utterly unique (on all fronts) technology that merely looks like an audio cable, as we’ve bent it to that design direction. Different and greater set of benefits and a few new problem areas never before encountered.

Cutting edge products appearing in poorly understood areas of science and physics (as applied to human life), are going to be expensive. The end. You are buying products built of exploratory work, in some notable cases.

If one wants rubber stamp mainstream pricing on items that are common and not invigorating, go to walmart and buy a $19.99 dvd player, or a $0.50 bar of soap.

You are here for quality and cutting edge. Kvetching about the cost of such is not productive and not about to achieve much of anything.

The only place it will be effective is if the person involved does not hear the differences (ie, incapable or all the way over to mentally blocked from it)  and then writes off the companies that do provide the cutting edge.

Like the equivalent of saying that one's own driving skills are in the formula 1 area of driving expertise and that they can out-drive these formula one drivers..while in their Chevy sunfire. Bizarre and, well, illiterate. The only place such a thing gains ground is when talking to people who swim in the same waters... (us vs them mentality of sameness being somehow elevated into a command of all reality form/function) and that's equally unproductive and insular.

willemj
"
It's indeed just a fraud, that is all there is to it. And a lucrative one."

If you can prove that it's a fraud rather than just endlessly repeat your faith-based belief you can be rich beyond you're wildest dreams! What is stopping you go for it the lawyers will have a field day getting them rich and you too, especially because it is so "lucrative"! Go Willie go prove your claim for once and for all in a court of law it is so easy it is just such a massive fraud!
It has already been done in a UK court of law: the cable seller lost and had to withdraw the product from his chain of stores.
willemj"It has already been done in a UK court of law: the cable seller lost and had to withdraw the product from his chain of stores"
Great you have a precedent to invoke that is wonderful start your own suit  after all it is a massive fraud and very lucrative as you say go have the lawyers make themselves and you a bundle of dollars think of all the fun you will have go Willie go sue them all - one at a time of course!