I am sick of cables

Mmarvin19,

I am similarly hard pressed to find a reason to change cables in my current system. The MIT Terminator line ICs I use absolutely sing and are affordable when you find them second hand.

$$$s do not necessarily determine utility with ICs I have found. There seem to be many very very good not too expensive wires out there.

Of course anything that costs mega-dollars should be expected to excel without fail. IS that always the case? I do not know since I do not swim in those hallowed waters.

I'm there, said the same thing a couple of years ago and was told by 1 audiophool that my comment was "reckless"

I don't think money should be the factor in determining cables but coherence is what to base judgement upon. Some may say a $500 Ic sounds the best in their system while others believe a $.50 piece of copper wire is perfect. Different flavors for different people. All in the quest of "best sound."

My approach is the same with cables as with any other potentially large investment.

I do some reading on what others have experienced with various products then start small (ie not too expensive) + typically used.

If I am not satisfied, I try something else.

If I try various options around a particular price point and am not satisfied with any, then I look to move up to something more costly when needed.

This is the fast track to landing on an overall system configuration that sings to you without necessarily just throwing $$$s at the problem out of the gate and hoping that solves all problems.

Isn't that the way most folks shop for most things?

You really have to resist the natural inclination to believe that price determines results. It may or may not in the end. You need to take things in reasoned steps, one at a time, to really know for sure.

What drives the cost of expensive cables (aside from markups) is the use of exotic materials and construction techniques. I think that the fundamental problem here is that there is little or no established science supporting a correlation between those materials and techniques and better sound.

And muddling the picture further is that many exotic cables are non-neutral by design, incorporating in some cases outlandish values of capacitance or inductance, or "network boxes" whose function is defined primarily by nonsensical techno-hype.

I don't think that one has to be an extreme cynic to feel that the manufacturers and sellers of exotic, expensive cables are taking advantage of our natural instinct to assume that more expensive = better, in selling products where there is little or no valid basis for that to be true. Other than, I should add, euphonic synergy (especially in the case of the non-neutral cables), which could most likely be duplicated at much lower cost if the designers were motivated to try to do so.

A quote from the Bill Whitlock paper I referenced in my earlier post in this thread (a paper which presents several fundamental reasons why cables CAN and DO sound different):

Some audio experts believe audio is too important to be trusted to technology, and consequently, they dismiss all scientific methods, including double-blind tests. This attitude, combined with the widespread notion that more expensive products must be better, has opened the door to a flood of marketing hype and misinformation. Promotional white papers abound with pseudo-science buzz words, theoretical explanations based on absurd and fanciful physics, and new proprietary measurement techniques replete with previously unknown units of measure.

Regards,
-- Al