Cable Costs Relative to System

Glad to have stared this thread. The trend that I'm seeing is that a majority of you are in the same boat as me: 10-20% spent on cables and most feel it's worth it. Unfortunately, whether it is psychology or science, I have always found that more expensive cables within a line (e.g.Nordost, Cardas, Kimber) sound better than the less expensive ones. Another point is that most of us start out with the electronics and then continually change/upgrade cables because they're the easiest to change in and out(and sell and ship). However, if we could take all of the cash and build a system from scratch using this set amount(say $75k), would cables get this large a budget?

Thahks, Treljia. That is the exact kind of info I was looking for in my original post. Have you (or anyone) actually compared these cables to some of the bigger brands?

OK, if so many are convinced that very expensive cables are a rip-off, who produces cables that sound everybit as good as top-of-the-line offerings from the big boys, e.g. Nordost Quattro Fil, Cardas GC, Kimber Select, etc. IN A HIGHLY RESOLVING SYSTEM?

Unfortunately, I believe that a lot of bias is introduced because people with lower resolving (generally, lower cost)systems absolutely will not see improvements from expensive cables. They therefore conclude that Brand XXX sounds the same as the expensive cable in all systems. I would be curious to hear from those that have systems that retail for >$50k, yet have significantly <10% spent on interconnects and speaker wire and <10% spent on PCs. I don't mean to suggest that all >$50k systems are better, but I am trying to put this in the context of the most expensive cables.

Is there anybody using <$250/meter cable in a >$50k audio system. If yes, please let us in on the magic.

Finally, if the big boys have such huge profit margins (and they do) why doesn't our free market handle this by us favoring high-value cable manufacturers? Are we all just sheep following advertising dollars? In the pre-internet days, we could blame the audio rags, but now we have forums like these to disseminate reviews and therefore can only blame ourselves if we are being "ripped-off".

One more point. We must also consider that although materials cost and manufacturing are a very small percentage of expensive cable costs, it may take an awful lot of Non-recurring Engininering (R&D) to get to the design of that cable. I doubt that Nordost Valhalla costs 20X more to produce than Nordost Solar Wind (Hell, they look the same!), but it does sound a ton better and it probably required more R&D to get it that way.