No kidding. I truly got disgusted with the whole "audiophile" joke decades ago when "Audiophile" magazine did their hilarious speaker and interconnect listening tests. The things those clowns imagined they could hear was great. As long as you did not spend a dime following their advice.
Geez, talk about gullible and suggestible personalities. The manufacturers of those cables and the ad copy guys had to be in stitches reading the reviews. As you would expect, the more outrageously expensive the cable and grandiose the claims, the more those twits liked it.
The things those clowns imagined they could hear
I hear ya man. Back in the 60’s & 70’s I subscribed to Stereo Review and High Fidelity and Audiophile mags, among others.
There was one ad for a speaker that was “designed just like the human ear...”
It was actually SHAPED like a human ear because, well, you know, what better shape to capture all of the subtleties and nuances of sound than .....wait for it....the human ear.
Being a young dude at the time, I didn’t “Get-It” about advertising, until I began to see a whole lot of ads for Tuners that utilized sexy babes in bikinis. They pretty much all used the same copy - Check out our ‘front-end’, or words to that effect...
The “Monster Cable” importer used to be about 5 miles from my house,,, the parent company name was Recoton they owned at least a dozen electronic and “gadget” company names ,, all imported from China ,, used to be hilarious going through their outlet store on Lake Emma Rd. in Lk. Mary FL ,, seeing one product slightly tweaked in ways that made NO impact on performance just appearance tweaks.. and sold for anywhere from reasonable to outrageous shelf prices... they used to be the provider for most of the accessories at BBuy.
For my cabling I shop at “skycraft” a surplus dealer that buys mostly from area defense and custom short run manufacturers. Great prices on milspec stuff....
Here’s an amusing video of a guy going off on overpriced overhyped audio cables...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7ERMu825m4