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Why not thinking that maybe they did it, and maybe there is no difference in the curves....not all what you hear is measurable...

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Well; as we had been discussing in the "Monster" thread; It definitely IS confusing.

It's not just with cables, but with just about anything a dealer is selling or is trying to sell. If they sell brands A,B, C, D etc...., they want you to beleive that the brands they sell are good products.

They have to use different marketing and advertising techniques to attract the consumers' attention. That's Business. It dosen't necessarily mean the products are good or bad, better or worse than others.

Let's face it; Monster Cable uses some heavy-duty marketing techniques, but it dosen't attract everyone, and it dosen't mean Monster Cable sucks because they put their products into the mass-market. It dosen't mean they are better because of the big marketing exposure either.

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True but more advertising means that's money they put into that and not the product itself.

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Or maybe they reduce the amount of profits to make the advertising, why we always have to think that the manufacturers are doing the wrong instead of the right thing? I do not believe that monster make the huge profits on the budget cables, they produce a lot of more expensive stuff, very good power conditioners, etc...

This has nothing to do with right or wrong but just a matter of allocation and priorities.

Of a $40 "budget" cable, how much do you think is material / manufacturing costs?

How does the $3000 cables from a company that does almost no advertising fit in?
I have a hard time imagining that the 6/9's copper they use cost 10 times as much as the 6/9 copper that someone else uses. Or the teflon, or any other part they use.

Massive profits come into play in these "boutique" cables, which is neccesary if you only sell 10 pair a year and you are trying to make a living. Sombody like Monster can still stay in business with a much lower markup on a product, because they do volume business. But volume business requires advertising.

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Allocation priorities, this is a good one, now this is called that way, wow!!!
If they take out the money from the product cutting corners and getting cheap materials, and put it into the advertising IMO this is wrong, if they use their profit for the advertising, and leave the product with the same quality this isthe way to go and IMO this is good...

I will give you a tip, canare is 36 cents a feet, plus two conectors of let's say 5.00 a pair, so it will be 10 in connectors and 12' of cable to make a 6' IC, let's speculate and say they will cost them less considering the bulk orders of parts, I guess no more than 15 a pair of 6', now add the advertising, packaging, shipping warranty, labor, and intelectual work, marketing, and store profits....etc...etc....do your math, IMO, almost nothing....

At the risk of stating (or repeating) the obvious, there is no measuring device anywhere near as sensitive as the human ear and the human brain. Also, just because at the present moment, humankind has found 2 or 3 different things we *can* measure, doesn't mean those are the *only* parameters that are measurable.

It's also not like we have the same kind of intellectual talent and financial resources devoted to solving the mystery of audiophile cables as we had on the Manhattan Project developing the A-bomb. This is a fringe area of limited interest and utility to society.

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I didn't say anything about cutting corners, you mentioned that. I'm just saying that the latter of so is better:

$20 worth of parts + advertising + extra = 40
$30 worth of parts parts + extra = 40

Yes advertising is needed to get into mass market / volume business. If that is your priority, then your resource allocation is $20 parts on a budget $40 cable.

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It doesn't. That's an extreme case.

Why the Mystery?

Well this is the DBT-free forum. We like mystery. We deliberately eschew DBT because it would result in red faces from those who have spent hundreds (or thouands!) on six feet of power cable. It would possibly mean the collapse of companies like Monster with loss of jobs, injurious to the economy.

As Markl correctly says, the ear tells more than the laboratory instrument. It's just that most people prefer to use all their other senses (like sight, touch, even smell) to color what their ears tell them. They also like to know what an item cost when they are listening to it. They like to know that they are hearing something hyped as the be-all and end-all of interconnect technology. DBT would take all that away.

So that's the answer - just because we like mystery

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Really? I doubt that. Things are routinely measured that are far beyond the ability of human senses. The only thing that is not measurable is the placebo effect.

The power of suggestion is GREAT.

Believe you ears, not what people want you to believe and most importantly not what you WANT to believe.

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Conversely, things are heard routinely that aren't measurable-- including differences in cables. (Also, placebo effect is measurable they measure it all the time in new drug trials, but that's beside the point) One can easily swap cables in and out, it isn't that difficult to compare if you know your system and what it sounds like, hearing changes is not some quasi-mystical, ESP telekinesis thing, a simple trial of one's own quickly clears up any alleged "mystery".
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I WANT to believe that the stock cables for my CDP are the equivalent of the VD Nite cables, but sadly for my wallet, my ears tell me otherwise!

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IMO this is not true at all, and IMO, the lab instruments go far above, below and beyond of what any human could hear or measure (including those freaks around..LOL...) and are extremely more precise, BTW, that any human hearing, but those are only limited for a known numbers of parameters, the ones we know, and the ones we are measuring and looking for, and the ones we insist in making responsible for those differences, as capacitance, inductance, resistance etc...(IMO, if those are the only ones responsible for those differences, there should be no difference then....)

Knowing that, you have now two options:

1. Maybe we are looking on the wrong places and the differences are due other parameters and not the ones we are measuring, maybe not even electric, and this is perfectly possible, and real. (and BTW the one I believe)

2. Or to accept that those are the only ones, and as a result there is not such a difference, as most of them measure very similar, and even ones that sounded better, have worst figures on those parameters, than others that sounded worst, and that all is in your mind as a result of placebo effect....(the one I refuse to believe)

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This would never happen in the real world. Bear in mind that the dealer is taking 40-50% off the top, give or take. If there is a distributor, he's likely getting 40-50% of the remainder. If the manufacturer has spent 50% of MSRP on parts, he's running in the red. The manufacturer may only see 25% of the MSRP at all. Figure that the manufacturer needs to pay employees, pay rent, eat, send his kids to college, etc., and you get some idea of what percent of retail price parts really are.