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Originally Posted by PhilS  Why don't all cars come with the best possible tires? Why aren't all TV broadcasts in HD? Manufacturers and vendors build and market their products to meet particular price points, market segments, etc., and to maximize profit. That means that most products are not designed to provide the best performance possible. Someone with a marketing degree or background could probably explain it even better, but there are probably hundreds or thousands of examples of products that could be improved with some sort of aftermarket modification, yet the manufacturer or vendor does not inlcude it because limited number of customers who are interested in that level of performance is not their main market, or it would otherwise not be profitable.  |
Alright, I've taken some marketing classes in connection with an accounting degree. I don't agree with your analogy.
There's a ton of stuff on the market that's just a barely tarted up version of the basic example. Consider another one of my hobbies: fountain pens. You can usually buy a basic version in a plastic/resin housing with an excellent feed, nib and ink storage system. Or you can buy the limited edition, say Abraham Lincoln Commerative Pen, made of 925 sterling with rubies and sapphires set into the body. One is $300, the other is $4,500. Both write the same. Or with cars. You know a $30k car doesn't cost all that much more to build than a $15k car. Do they really spend $15k more in materials? No. Most of the cost is in the overhead, stuff like the factory, tooling, labor, pensions, etc. You get the idea.
And it's no different with cables. Call in an order to China, have them braid it in a funny way, tart up the sheathing, and use cast silver (or whatever) connectors at the end. Then you mark it up 20,000% and brand it as "luxury" or "audiophile." That's where you really make the margin. If you look at the bare materials of a Nordost Valhalla, objectively, there's no way the sum of the parts adds up to cost. If you think the rest is tied up in R&D, you're wrong. As we've seen from the endless DBT, etc. testing that's been done, no one really knows how cables work.
If you want to throw around terms like "skin effect," etc., that's disingenuous. Sure, skin effect is real. It's demonstrable in the lab. So are a lot of other things. The disingenuous part is when there's no causal link between the described effect and what the end result is. This is a logical fallacy, a non-sequitur. It's just like arguing that water causes cancer. After all, 100% of people with cancer drank a glass of water at one time. However, it just does not follow that water causes cancer without empirical evidence.
So when you see the cable manufacturers throwing out all sorts of electronic exotica, stop and ask yourself how the described effect affects the cable. Further, do you see any results of testing? Of course not.
If there was a way to adequately test the cables, the manufacturers would do so. They are not naive. They know people call their products snake oil. So why not prove the nay-sayers wrong? Why don't they do that? Why don't they nail down and prove their products excellent? Why do they only describe their products in vague terms, just barely skirting the issue of false advertising? Also, why don't they want to prove their products superior to the competition? Pick up any car magazine and you'll get tons of copy about the differences between models. But not with cables. They don't do it because they can't.
