Life expectancy of Interconnects & Speaker Cable?

Dlwask....if you spent 5k on cable 5 yrs ago....how much better can that cable get?

I would guess life expectancy of a well built cable to be around 100 years, give or take. Rough handling could decrease this time drastically.

I don't believe there has been any tremendous improvement in cable design in the last 5 years. The only 'improvement' that I find much more prevelant in today's top cables is cryogenic processing.
The designs are fairly similar. You could send your 5 year old state of the art cables out to be cryo'd, and I'm sure they'd be right at home with today's best cables.

Okay, now for a serious answer:

I'm a veteran audiophile and I still have some old Monster Interlink Reference (black) as well as a smattering of most other cables I've used over the last 20 years.

Properly terminated cables don't go bad under normal conditions. I just used a pair of those 20+ year old Monster Cables on a tuner in my reference system and they sound great. I doubt that they sounded much better, ever.

The main thing I have noticed over the years is that the resolution of audio cables has continually evolved. However, today, you can get top performance -- detail, dynamics, linearity, soundstaging, etc. for a small fraction of the price of the top-performing cables from 5 or 10 years ago.

Yes, the top prices of cables continues to climb, but so does the bang-for-the-buck in the moderate and lower price ranges.

Has it peaked? Well, probably not. No-one's using superconductors in the audio industry as far as I'm aware. Will future cables using superconductor technology sound better in your system? Very Likely. Will they cost a fortune when first introduced? Even more likely. Will it ever end? Not very likely...

Oops, I just remembered another likely scenario:

Optical cables and interfaces will become the new standard and our kids/grandkids will laugh at us when we tell them we used to use cables made out of real metal conductors in the old days...

Anybody that spent 5k on cables could undoubtably be convinced 5 years later that there was something infinitely better then for a tad more.