Do you really need ultra expensive cables?

No need for ultra expensive cables. You just need well designed cables that use quality ingredients and proper assembly techniques. If you stick with low capacitance designs for interconnects, high capacitance designs for speaker cables and high capacitance designs for power cords, you'll be ahead in both time and money.

As a general rule, solid core conductors are preferred but some stranded designs can sound quite good also. Conductor shapes and geometries do come into play. One should avoid designs that suffer from skin effect, use low grade "lossy" dielectrics or mass quantities of any dielectric. All cables benefit from time spent on some type of a "cable burner". Cables that are "burned in" tend to sound better than an identical cable that hasn't been burned, even if the un-burned cable has hundreds of hours of actual in-system use. Sean
>

IMHO, I don't think we "need" anything in any hobby. But, I do think that some people just want the ultra "good for the job" cables. As we all know that the price is somewhat related to the quality (and also marketing, blah, blah, blah..) of the cables, getting the ultra "good for the job" can mean getting the ultra expensive cables.

Since cable is a passive component, it depends heavily on the components it connects. Having said that, you can make any cable "comparable" to the others. But, if you fix with a good pair of components to connect, I really believe that you'll have a better chance to get a better quality by randomly picking an expensive one rather than a cheap one. How far better chance? It depends on how far the price difference is. This might be another reason to make this hoppy fun. To beat the chances, :). If you can beat that chance by very far, you can hold your head so high that everyone else would want to kick you (or do something similar).

No.

Cables make a HUGE difference. Even power cords.

You don't "need" to spend any particular percentage on cables and you may well find a low cost cable family that suits your system quite well.

But they do make a huge difference.

You might want to use the Cable Company's rental service to experiment with different cables. You can try out the family sound of different brands, and you can determine for yourself what is the most effective price point. The staff at Cable Company (unless they have had turnover recently) get a LOT of feedback about cables and have a wealth of knowlege to advise you. Call 1-800-FAT-WYRE.

I guess I should disclaimer - I don't benefit from Cable Company's success, other than as an audiophile seeing others in the hobby prosper.

Art

Pbb said it all...
And i'll repeat it: NO.