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Some are gold plated, rhodium plated, and silver plated. Some are cryo'd and made by hand. It is just speculation that these fuses are only 30c items
Not entirely. Glass tubing is dead cheap and easy to get. A $5-$10 tool is all you need to cut it. Silver closed at $19.74/oz. yesterday. One ounce would probably plate hundreds, if not thousands, of tubes. You can assemble a plating kit in your garage for maybe $50-$100. The little end caps could be pressed by hand, or you could order bags by the thousand from China. There's very little metal in them and not exactly a lot of machining. A little bit of ceramic clay is dead cheap, and so is any epoxy or glue you use to hold them together. Cryo is really cheap, too. I haven't priced it for awhile, but I think it was $5 or $6 to have some plane blades treated. One blade would probably take up the equivalent volume of three or four hundred fuses.
I suppose if you made a few jigs and built a few specialized tools, you could crank a lot of these out in your garage for probably no more than $1 each. Labor would be nothing since there's so little to actually do. It's not like an amp with 200, 300 or more connections to make. If you're able to sell them at $30, you'll recover your tool costs after selling a handful. They'd go into pure profit pretty fast.
Same thing with cables, by the way.
I wonder if it is any coincidence that the most controversial stuff in audio is always the least complex stuff that anyone can knock off in their garage or a spare bedroom. It seems that the simpler something is, the more likely it will have magical claims, angry defiance of known science and sold at a fantastically high price.
You see some BS with headphones, amps and sources. But those take some skill and know-how to build.
I think the simpler things, like fuses, cables, isolation devices, etc. have a much lower barrier to entry, so they're naturally attractive to those looking for a fast buck.
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