You certainly don’t require a nice HiFi system if you can’t hear the dramatic difference between my brand new Audioquest Dragon cords and my broken in demos of the same cords. To me the difference is blatantly obvious and my system took a dive with the new cords. But things have changed after a week. Still not where things were with the demo cords yet. Or maybe the evil scheming cable companies hand out superior cables for demos! There’s a new conspiracy theory.
The one thing that the cable companies may be guilty of is charging about 4X what it should cost to achieve decent margins. But I’m just an armchair critic; maybe their costs really do back up their prices. But if so I’d be surprised. It’s their high prices that fuel all the conspiracy theories.
A counter argument to my criticism of the high prices of audiophile grade cables is that if margins are truly over-inflated, then you’d expect that would create an opening for a giant killer company to swoop in and sell cables that perform like the very best at 25% of the cost. And yet this hasn’t happened. So maybe it can’t be done.