Can I start some trouble?

How do you define different, not better? It is a matter of taste after all.

The Toyota Avalon and one of the Lexus 300 series are basically the same car. The Lexus justs cost more and folks feel better owning one, and being able to say they can afford one.

Compared to less costly cables? In most legitimate situations, no. Quality comes at a premium. There are certainly instances, however, where a more costly cable is less probable of being 'better' (as in better i am refering to 'more of nothing'.) in a given system.

For the most part you get what you pay for...The market takes care of those that are ripoffs in short order.....It is nonsense to think that component/cable voicing is a conspiracy.....We all do the best we can and some do it better than others.....Find a designer whose gear you like and buy into a systems approach as they all have their favorite wires and associated gear that will magnify the parameters they feel are important to the experience....

It's highly unlikely that the manufacturers COULD do anything to power cords or power conditioners that would reliably change the sound. It is possible for cables, although the only tools available to them would make the cables less accurate (in a technical sense) than 12 AWG zipcord. It's possible that someone with overly bright speakers might like a cable that rolled off the highs (though that strikes me as an odd way of going about things--why not just buy more accurate speakers in the first place?).

Frankly, I think the manufacturers rely more on expectation effects than real engineering.

"Frankly, I think the manufacturers rely more on expectation effects than real engineering".

bomarc .. you took the words out of my mouth. And I think this applies to all audio components, not just cables (though they are probably the worst offenders).