The truth about interconnects - can you handle it?

As an electronic design engineer, and a fervent believer in the scientific approach to understanding our world it saddens me that so many "scientific" people are so closed minded to anything that they cannot explain with their limited science. Be skeptical, by all means, but don't be closed minded, because once you reach that point all progress halts. Remember Einstein .. imagination is more important than knowledge. Or the saying "To those with limited knowledge there are infinite possibilities ... to those with great knowledge there are few".
I'm skeptical that time travel or teleporting will ever be a reality, but I will never say never ... can you imagine explaining to a person of 500 years ago that people would travel to the moon, or that the rate of progression of time was altered by gravitational fields, or that the mass of an object increases with the speed of that object ?
I was very skeptical of cables, and I remain very skeptical of the amounts of money paid for cables, but I have heard with my own ears that they do make a difference.

Sean: The question isn't, can cables sound different? Of course they can, and I know of no one who would argue otherwise. The question is, when they do sound different, can we explain why? And the answer is, yes we can. Now, it might turn out that someday someone will discover that our current explanation is wrong. But, as in the cases you cited, that will happen because we happen upon things we cannot explain, which forces us to look for new explanations. So far, nobody's come up with any unexplainable phenomena.

Bomarc ... I'm pretty much in agreement that so far I haven't heard of any audio phenomena that could not be explained scientifically, including the science of the perception of sound. I must have miunderstood your previous post because I think we're in close agreement.

There have been many times when I've managed to improve the sound of my system by making a change that I was convinced would have no effect, and then afterwards I have been able to think through why it has worked. For example adding an external DAC to my mid-fi CD player made almost no difference, even though the DACs, power supplies and output stages were much better in the external DAC. Then I added a monarchy DIP and suddenly the external DAC sounds much much better. I then did some reading on timing jitter and it's pretty clear what happened. Same with interconnects, speaker cables etc etc.

None denies that cables sound different but by all means when you strip or look inside the mega-priced ones you see just the same industrial grade wires with some phoney information about close to ideal purity that you can easily buy for pennies at Home Depot. The same thing is to the speaker wires as well.

Any further fancy coating and gold-plated plugs for $50/pr just makes no sence at all. No need to go further than $9/pr Dayton connectors in that case for even $100k equipment.

Wires that cost like a diamond necklace won't ever be any better than $40/pr ones. And in that price range there are plenty-of-plenty to choose the one you'll like if you will hear the differences between them. They will certainly sound better than thin RS ones for $3.

The reactance influence is so minimal and audio freequencies that you needn't worry about that as long as equipment does not oscillate from RF.

Redbeard: You sure opened a can of worms with this thread.

IMO; It does not matter how a cable is built, voodoo science, or marketing hype but rather the end result. That is, how does a cable perform in your system. If it is a real improvement enjoy the music, otherwise get your money back.