I don't want to get into whether there are audible differences between high-end audio cables (I don't have experience with cables of that caliber, so can't speak from first-hand experience). But it does raise something I have often wondered about. The market for $1,500 cables must be very, very small. While I'm sure each individual cable is very profitable, the total annual profit to the manufacturer must be very small in terms of the overall cable market. Moreover, one or both of two things must be true: (1) the manufacturer is not making the raw cable itself and/or (2) the raw cable is not unique to the $1,500 cable. It simply wouldn't be profitable to produce high-end, unique raw cable in runs of...what? 200ft? 500ft?
That means that the raw cable is almost certainly being used in other products. And those other products are likely to be significantly cheaper. So what accounts for the premium in the $1,500 cable? Presumably it is the hand assembly and overall build quality. I'm not saying those things don't contribute to the signal-carrying capability, but I wonder what portion of the overall signal-carrying ability they represent vs. the conductor, which must be the most expensive part of it.
Moreover, the R&D budget for a $1,500 cable must be tiny to non-existent. So how did the manufacturer determine that the $1,500 cable is the optimum design? Did they just pile premium components into it and charge more? I don't assume that more expensive raw materials necessarily perform better. Did they test the cable? Do they have any data to show that it performs better? We're talking about a digital cable: presumably you could feed a signal in, then check to make sure that the signal on the other side is identical, then show how other cables introduce a greater number of errors, or result in higher jitter or whatever. Companies like Canare or Belden or Mogami have real R&D programs and budgets. They have high-tech manufacturing facilities with tight tolerances. Does that mean that someone else can't produce a hand-crafted product that performs better? Of course not. But the odds are against it.
I don't mean to pick on cables in particular here. This is generally true of any product where:
- product cost is high
- quantities are low
- hand-crafted product is competing against a product made in a modern, automated, high-end manufacturing environment (not something made by injecting plastic into a mold, or stamping metal sheets)
- R&D is key
- a small-time manufacturer couldn't possibly produce all of the components themselves
As several people here know, I have had my headphones recabled at considerable cost with custom cables. But I don't have any illusions that the guy who makes those cables is making his own wire, weaving his own cable sleeving, making his own connectors, etc. He is buying various, common components and assembling them with care. The cost of the cables reflects his cost for the raw materials, and his skilled labor in assembling them (not to mention his advice and experience during the cable design process). It does NOT reflect the value of some magical incantation that imbues his cables with the sonic benefits of eye of newt. And to take it a step further, I have no reason to believe that when soldering the wire to the connectors, he does a better job doing this by hand than, say, Sennheiser did when manufacturing the stock HD800 cable in their automated facilities.
Again, this is NOT about cables. My point is just that as the cost of a product gets higher and volumes get lower, it seems to me that from a practical perspective, it actually gets HARDER, not easier, to produce a better product. Think about this: if I offered to pay you $1,000,000 for a handmade, custom-designed hard drive, could you build something better than what I can buy at Best Buy for $100?
No need to respond to this post. Nothing in here says that any specific $1,500 cable cannot perform better than another specific $300 cable. You would have to test those specific cables to see if there was a difference in performance, and as I don't even know what cables you are talking about, I obviously haven't done that. I'm just thinking out loud here...
