7500 for USED cables? Are they joking?

mark: since i, myself, have only just awakened after spending these past 20 years in a coma, i quite understand your concerns. my two sons, who were but grade-schoolers as i remember them, now each earn in just a year what it took me a decade to realize! my modest tract house that my wife and i scrimped and saved for to purchase for $40,000 is now assessed for $300,000! when i replaced my beloved BMW this year, my new one cost ten times more than its predecessor! and food! don't even talk about it. please. how can anyone afford to live in these times? and, my god, look how tastes have changed! my hero, lawrence welk, is now replaced by someone named "snoop doggy dog"? playboy magazine now shows, ahem, pubic hair? i'm with you, mark. i'm sticking with zip cord. thin zip cord. the wildly expensive wire is just more, ahem, pubic hair. and i still refuse to look at it! who would care to get close enough to listen to it?!

r. vanwinkle.

Cables do make a difference in better systems. You can hear it. When you consider the cost of materials and labor some brands can justify the price although $7500 is a bit steep. I think <$1000 for interconnects is all you have to pay if you find a good brand. The Nordost, Siltech, and Transparent folks are laughing all the way to the bank.

As far as power and electricity goes, it seems that power cables and transformers, etc. outside of your home have a lot to do with the quality of electricity that ultimately is fed into your gear. If your neighborhood has older parts for wires and boxes, then there's only so much you can improve on that in my experience.
And the whole cable issue is completely outrageous. I own a pretty decent system - costing me well over 10K for the components alone. The cables/interconnects were the last thing I upgraded, from the Audioquest $40 jobbies I was using before, to the Cardas Cross/Quadlinks I'm using now. Now I've been into hi-end gear for about 15 years - and I'm not kidding when I say I can't tell the difference, except for the fact that the Cardas look a lot more elegant. A complete placebo effect if you ask me. Try this - ask a friend to hook up your system with sub $50 cables and then with $400+ cables without telling you which was which. If the cable market is correct, you should be able to unequivocally tell the difference 10 out of 10 times, which I'm sure anyone would be hard pressed to do.

Mark admits to being out of audio for eight years. How many cell phones have been sold in that time? We are being bombarded DAILY with increasing amounts of rfi! I have found in my system the single ended cables sound as different from each other as components do. When using balanced, the difference is minimal. I have a/b'd $100.00 monster mic cables with $10,000.00 nordost Valhalla balanced in a $80k system. Barely percievable was the difference. Blindfolded doubt I could tell. Single ended anyone should be able to tell. -and while your ac is limited by the romax in the wall, what's the first thing your component sees? The cord coming out of it. Haven't we all see what happens to the TV when someone in the house using a different circuit turns on a vacumn or micro wave? I for one don't want that pollution getting to my stereo. Speaker cables as well are very suseptable to rfi.
Now, are these "tiffany cables" stupidly over priced? ABSOLUTELY! Some are quite costly to make, but by the time the distributer and retailer double and re-double the price it is totally out of line, there's NEVER a sale, or any nogotiation. Which is not to say these companies don't deserve to make a living. I like to physically see and hear a product in a store first. But perhaps if there were more direct sales manufacturers, the retail prices would experience downward pressure.
I have a fair amount of top monster cable products, while they aren't "fashionable", they do most of what the best cables are capable of, and I can justify the price, as they are aimed at the mass market. Another hi performing resonable price line is Custom Cable Company, they really blow away competitors for a fraction of the $.
For the record, I worked 20+ years as a live & studio engineer and performer, in the US & internationally. While I never got wealthy, I do spring for good cables in my home recording studio (16 track 2inch analog) as have an increasing number of my associates. Glass fiber optic cables for digital studios, etc.
Bottom line: we all have to live w/in our tax bracets, but to ignore the science of interference causing audiable artifacts and robbing fidelity from those who care about it is dening yourself greater enjoyment!

The $7500 price is outragest.
Very few items are in that price range, so you are talking extremes.
Don't discard something until you try it, Or in this case listen to it.
Suprising, Power cords on good equipment can make a large difference in the pleasure obtained listening to the equipment.
Power cords such as the Whale Elite and many , many interconnects cables allow the Components to sound as closly as they were designed.
Remenber, the phrase "it is only as good as the weakest link ?