Since we seemed to have revived this ancient thread, let me remind you all to keep an open mind as posted previously in
this thread on page 7:
Cheers
Well, that's great. Though I must also point out that things are not always as clear-cut as they seem. A great deal of people who claim that cables make no difference seem to consider placebo to be the only possible explanation for any differences claimed. Along with that, there seems to be a false trust in double-blind tests - subjects who go into the test believing that there is NO difference between any of the cables will give results exactly according to his/her assumption/bias/belief. Is this scientific?
So one side clings on to (a) placebo and (b) the holiness of the double blind test.
The other keeps banging on about (c) I can hear it, so it must be real and (d) pseudoscientific concepts.
I don't see one side as more rational than another. In fact, I see more evidence sympathetic to the latter. Consider that:
1.) There're a lot of places that do a 30 day return on cables. There are many places that lend out cables for home trials.
2.) Places like Audiogon, eBay, Head-fi, etc., etc. allow people to list their cable, unimpeded from the manufacturers.
These two facts make trying to fleece people for huge bucks on cables that do practically nothing different to the free one they got very, very hard, surely. We're not talking about a cable that's perhaps not worth the price difference, but we're talking about something that's NO DIFFERENT from what you had earlier so okay, let's say 50% of the time, the placebo effect takes hold and people spend their thousands on the new cable, but the 50% would be sent back, surely.
Searching on eBay, I'm getting 182 results for Nordost, 283 for Cardas, and 11 for JPS labs. These guys have been selling cables since time began, so there should be more of their alleged scams being sold off on the web surely? (6,585 for Monster Cable, incidentally.) And I'm including fake cardas's and nordosts's here too, btw.
If one goes by logic, if I've paid $1,000 for a pair of interconnects that don't do anything I got for $50, then why keep them both and waste $1,000? Why not sell the expensive one for 5-600 or something? Better yet, return them? Of all unaffected by the placebo effects, surely 100% would take this route as such we should see way more of them for sale, surely?
We also have the fact that people willing to throw thousands at their cables tend to compare different brands. I wonder how expectation bias works here? Say Cardas being proven, tried and tested, Kubala Sosnas being new and different… so how are we going to go with this? Where will the bias take us? Is it really complex enough to also reflect in totally imaginary differences between brands too? If it's all that, surely we should be look at reviews of amps, headphones and all sorts of stuff in a different light, but then again, are those measurable differences between amps actually audible?
Lastly (3) brands keep coming up with different models of cables.
I'm from the far east, so I know about fake things and things pretending to be what they're not. The thing i find odd is that if someone, say JPS labs makes totally normal cables that perform no different to 'normal' ones but sell them at outrageous prices, then what's the need to make more or newer models? If the answer is to re-fool the fool who paid for the old model then surely this is going to be a smaller and smaller market and not really a great model to go on. If it's to drum up the market and get people excited and rush out to buy their stuff then why do they come up with new cables very rarely? It's not like car makers with their 5 year cycle or whatever, cables seem to be released new very rarely and with very little fanfare.
May be they're amazing con-men, but this does not appear to be activities of people who make things that don't really work. If I were to try to make as much money as I can selling crap cables, I'd make crazy claims, use similarly crazy pricing and I will be out of a business in no time. But guys like George Cardas have been at this for a long time and remain respected members of the industry. Also many component manufacturers use internal wires from a specific manufacturer. Why would they want to use these expensive components if there's no difference between these and plain simple wires? (Before you say it's for boutique-value, how many actually advertise that they use specific brands of internal wires?)
It seems to me that there are many more factors we should take into account before putting it all down to cons and placebos. Again, that's may be me being close-minded.
