1. I understand how this industry operates and believe that hi-end cable making is the best business of them all.
Low-tech, simple, easy to store and ship, hi-margin. Still hard to penetrate: you need to find really good material and produce some proprietary splitters and plugs.
I think PW and EA founders are multi-millionaires. I know a person who does low-end cables by hand in his basement and makes a great living with prices much lower than the aforementioned.
I myself have a company that sells hi-ticket information products based on strong personal brands of a few experts. I understand that a pricing strategy may be:
- in a manufacturing oriented company: based on cost, like you suggest (old school way of doing business)
- in a marketing oriented company: based on the subjective value of the solution for the customer. Brand and product positioning etc.
2. I still can’t unhear Murakumo2.
I have a great multitude of lower-end cables (“shielding” also - both ddHiFi cables from silver and copper). They just don’t scale as high as these overpriced TOTL we rave about here. So it’s not only a business for suckers, there is something going on.
3. I’m not sure we completely understand how the sound is transmitted through a cable. It’s quantum mechanics rather than Newton’s physics. The current doesn’t just go through the wire from what I understand. I watched some films about it, it supposedly has to do with fields rather than electron particles moving. Maybe someone here understands better and would explain.
Why isn’t silver the best sounding cable? Why 99% silver mixed with gold is even more technically proficient if it supposedly destroys the conductivity? Why is a hi-end copper cable louder when connected to a dap at the same volume than a low-end silver sometimes?
I really like your comments, and I learned a lot about business, marketing and humans that I greatly appreciate.
So I dare to address 3., as science questions.
The science of electrical signal transmission is completely (and it is a strong statement that can be used here) understood, e.g
nothing principally new has been discovered for about almost 100 recent years since the theories were laid out and Bell worked it out well practically into commercial products for phone lines. No quantum effects (nanoscale functional structures are unlikely, and that would be a different story to signal transmission in IEMs). Noise can be linked to metal heterojunctions and poor use of solders - something that can be fixed in good simple cables, but perhaps can be tangibly better in expensive cables, but never demonstrated by cable companies.
A great question about 1% - at this level, the alloy of close metals, like gold and silver, still has conductivity only ca. 20 lower than pure metal (which is not a significant factor), while gold-silver 50-50 at% alloy is more than 6 times less conductive and silly to use for the cables (similar to the use of palladium, rhodium and other metals in alloys). So, in this example, 1% is reasonable science employed by marketing- (this 1% does not make any positive difference in this alloy, but not very detrimental, and then, understandably, sounding expensive and advanced for up-pricing...)
Thick copper cables can be "louder" because of their better resistivity (very simple physics/math). Only ca. 5% difference in conductivity between silver and copper cables of the same diameter, while just 20% thicker copper cables (and copper is much less expensive to make thicker cables) is ca. 35% more conductive (the scaling with the thickness is of the power of 2). This difference can be easily picked up using low-resistance transducers (as per "rule of 8" in relative differences in conductivities).
Why the difference then, if not in signal transmission science, - it is clearly in psychoacoustics: e.g. nice cables surely feeling better. For instance, I can easily convince myself that my blue cables are euphonic/musical/(anything else from any marketing brochure), and the perceived difference is absolutely real for me, that is how brain operates. Further to it, related ego validation comes for reinforcement: if it is expensive - it must be good/better, especially since others can perceive it.
Pharaphrasing you - at the core of the perception of cable differences is the carefully created and reinforced perceived value for consumers based on marketing and peer validation.
That is why even mentioning of blind tests is strongly chastised and often censored here - not to shatter psychoacoustic illusions and to keep consumers happy.
If I do not see my beatiful blue cable - I can't turn on my imagination about all its great virtues anymore .
Blind testing simply removes all the marketing "everything", with only the basic underlying science remaining, leaving then "proverbial kings" in their expensive cloth naked - definitely not the feeling to experience in a hobby.
I will be really happy to be wrong here - if blind testing is done - please educate me.