I think we all can agree that cable has way too many channels with nothing of value to watch on them.

How boring would this hobby be without any Custom or Hi End cable makers or part suppliers? Lot of really nice stuff out there.

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But didn't you just disagree with Uncle Erik's proposal?

I'm sure your point is valid but that excludes the issue of marking up from this thread - 'What do pro and anti cablers agree on.' as it is obviously a point of contention

I disagreed with his rhetorical question about price being the only indicator of quality, which I'm sure he disagrees with too.

I disagree with you there because the topic is about what we agree upon not what we disagree upon. Get on topic!

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Owch. Take it easy with those exclamation marks!!!!!!!

If you read other posts I think you will see the subject of cable companies charging too much is actually a source of disagreement with some. So I am on Topic.

Or do you agree to disagree?

I already explained the factors in disagreements. It's your choice whether or not you think it is valid to interject your opinions of 1. whether or not cables make a difference and 2. what constitutes proper mark-up (and remember all cable companies mark-up differently) into the question of whether they are overcharging. I prefer to look at it from a purely economic survival viewpoint, and I think if others do the same and are armed with these individual cable companies' financial papers, we would all come to the same exact conclusions of whether or not these individual companies are charging too much or too little or just right.

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I have not expressed an opinion, I just want to see points of agreement between pro and anti cablers, and this ain't one of them.

BTW Sorry I was editing my previous post when you replied, pretty much the same though

By you I mean the southern y'all or the Philadelphia yous.

Since you don't agree with what I said, will you agree that we disagree over you disagreeing with me when I say that people actually wouldn't disagree on "whether a cable company charges too much" if they could answer the question without prejudice and with sufficient data?

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Take a look at the costs. If a cable is $50, well, you can argue that's fair.

But the ones that are $3,000 or $4,000 and have $25 of materials in them, you really can't say that. Even a $200 or $300 cable is dramatically marked up.

Also, there are objective measures for this. Poke around some accounting and business texts and you'll see the margins for all sorts of businesses.

Profits for cables are just about off the charts. There are very, very, very few products that give this level of return. Even the "mainstream" cables like Monster give BestBuy their largest profit margin aside from their extended warranties. Any wonder why they heavily promote either?

Massive profit margins are a magnet for people who might not have the best interests of the consumer at heart. I can't say that every company is out there for the money, but it is certain that quite a few are. That's when you get Home Depot house wire inside a Techflex-covered garden hose filled with sandblasting medium selling for $2,000. One company got caught doing that, by the way.

Also, you can't ever really confront a lie head on. Lies are always calculated to be difficult to refute if taken as proposed by the liar. Whatever a liar loudly asserts is usually tough for anyone to tackle on the terms of the lie itself.

So the best way to dismantle a lie is to come at it sideways. Look at the implications of the assertions and other things that must be true. If you can knock out a few of those, the lie usually becomes transparent.

One of the ways to go after cables is to look at the finances. If profit margins are in the thousands of percent, well, why is that? Is it because there's that much going into them? No, because there can't be any R&D (scientific tests don't work, right?) and a roll of custom wire from China (where almost all of it comes from two or three factories) isn't that expensive. Labor to cut wire and attach jacks is almost nothing. These businesses can be run out of a garage or even a bedroom, so no costs there. You can see where this is going.

If someone is going to make outrageous claims about cable while making several hundred or thousand from selling $25 of wire, then do you think they might have a good motive to lie to make that profit?

While I won't go into it here, but cables fall apart completely whenever you go after them sideways. Every analysis suggests that they're just made by people who cannot test their own products (because no one can, right?) hoping for an enormous payoff. And you know how human nature is.

Uncle Erik, markup % is all across the board for different companies. BJC is probably the prime example. Agreed?

I guess something agreed on by the majority regardless of camp is that the effect of cables is at most very subtle. Or is that a wrong impression?

Wrong for me, my 10 foot blue dragon cable is not subtle at all when used with my better gear. I can't swap it anymore though. I've been thinking about asking someone to make a special switch to switch between blue dragon and stock that can attach to the screw-in jack on the pro 900 headphones but it's kind of a big hassle since I balanced and I think I lost the screws for the jack.

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Concerned this could be the minor skirmish that starts an all out war!

I like Currawings take on this;
'I think both sides agree that for the retail price of many commercial cables, you can buy a lot better gear that will give you a much greater improvement in SQ. '

Do you agree with Currawongs statement Halo?

Headphones need cables to work?

(not including most crappy wireless headphones)

Of course there's a tendency for equipment other than cables to make a bigger change to an unspecified setup than cables, but it won't always be the case. That's merely a statement of a tendency and although I agree it is a good rule of thumb, a pro-cabler can give examples where stock cables might pose a terrible barrier to achieving better sound quality. If we want to agree on something we should agree on something significant and that will lead to less contention. For example I agree that the economy sucks, can you agree that the economy sucks?