why do people feel the need to buy expensive cable

Science is not a religion. That's ridiculous.

Well, yes, idealistically, it is not a religion. A bazillion caveats that require a near insurmountable level of wariness and vigilance to avoid the trap of the human carrier.

The problem with science, is it involves the humans who conceived it. Therefore it is rife with religious undercurrents in it's practical execution.

The psychology of the carrier is built out of people and possesses many a colored logic fault. The concept and execution of science is impossible to separate from this fundamental carrier..so...

I would never have agreed to go back on the ’spend more/pray for good results" merry go round if I had not heard truly remarkable differences when the cables in question in place and not been fooled in the double-blind testing when they were not.

We’ve been trying to break the price higher--better results paradigm in half. Problem is, people don’t really expect to get better for a lower price and dealers and so on, generally HATE that kind of scenario.

EG, what if one, as a dealer or a manufacturer....has a customer upgraded to $20-30-40-80k in the costs of a loom, and something comes along that invalidates that decision, a decision which might be only a few months to a few years old?

The dealers want the new company dead.
The manufacturers want that company dead.
The magazines with their ad revenue want that company dead.
The existing ’in situ’ high end group..wants that company dead.

But they would all gladly promote the new ideals, if they could take the company, ideas, and profits away from the new company. It’s ok, great in fact, if they could eat the new...and stay on top.

There is not acceptance by the market end of the pond, instead there is utter rejection on all fronts. Customers rarely expect better for less, as well. They are wired to expect that better always costs more. Even the customer base walks away from a potentially better deal, aided by the views and positions of the market they deal with.

All the standard human responses to the threat of change.

the next point is that we’ve reached a brick wall in ’wire’ cable design. We’re going in circles, when in the given system, $200-500 cables are barely different to some audiophiles than a $20k cable.

Even if we give people a break (but really a break to the cable business) and say "not all can hear these subtle differences depending on system components and the ear/brain of the individual doing the listening", and so on. Even when we take that into account...we are clearly now going in circles with ’wire’.

Which illustrates a system gone stale. Nothing fundamentally new, or possible. An end game. The elephant in the ’wire/cable’ room. The fight between detail and screech in high end cable design (including power cords and fancy power centers, etc). You’ve hit the development wall. Congratulations. What are they going to do, guild the Lilly on another $10k power bar? When in the end run, there is not much left other than that. Infinity costs and infinity pricing... into the last 2-5% of perfection of a finalized technology. Nothing new there.

Time for something different running on a different track?

I’m slowly coming to another opinion on what forums are. It was obvious before but never so plainly as it is in some instances like this.

It appears to be about trying to get people to understand how informed logic works.

and again, if you buy used, especially cables, you can often sell in a few years for no/little loss...

People almost never sell our cables. They keep them. Very rare on the used market. Everything else in the system goes, and repeatedly...but not the cables. There’s no where else to go...

It’s case of small runs of custom and sometimes quite unique manufacturing.

You can’t have exclusive impossible to find products (compared to lets say a salt shaker, or keyboard, or coffee table) somehow priced as a mass market item.

As well, costs change. They do it all the time. Ie, one batch of raw materials may be twice the cost of the old when the new arrives at the dock.

It is not unusual to get a new price sheet from a supplier, where you need to put a seat-belt on your office chair before you open the PDF file...then see the new numbers (50-100-200% increases) and suffer severe shock to the mind and heart all while your orifices contract mightily. This has been the way of the manufacturing world for at least the last decade.

Some materials are eliminated and have to be bought on the second hand market, or bought in massive bulk, before they are deleted as a catalogue item.

Eg Charles Hansen of Ayre talked about how many transistors they had to buy before a certain item was deleted, and Nelson Pass had to pay a quite serious sum to have a custom run batch of SIT transistors made up for him by southwestern. Seemingly minutes later, southwestern closed their doors (bought out/shut down). Similar thing for many others.

In our case, it is a utterly unique (on all fronts) technology that merely looks like an audio cable, as we’ve bent it to that design direction. Different and greater set of benefits and a few new problem areas never before encountered.

Cutting edge products appearing in poorly understood areas of science and physics (as applied to human life), are going to be expensive. The end. You are buying products built of exploratory work, in some notable cases.

If one wants rubber stamp mainstream pricing on items that are common and not invigorating, go to walmart and buy a $19.99 dvd player, or a $0.50 bar of soap.

You are here for quality and cutting edge. Kvetching about the cost of such is not productive and not about to achieve much of anything.

The only place it will be effective is if the person involved does not hear the differences (ie, incapable or all the way over to mentally blocked from it)  and then writes off the companies that do provide the cutting edge.

Like the equivalent of saying that one's own driving skills are in the formula 1 area of driving expertise and that they can out-drive these formula one drivers..while in their Chevy sunfire. Bizarre and, well, illiterate. The only place such a thing gains ground is when talking to people who swim in the same waters... (us vs them mentality of sameness being somehow elevated into a command of all reality form/function) and that's equally unproductive and insular.

@teo-audio"go to Walmart and buy a $19.99 DVD player or a .50 bar of soap" excuse me? What arrogant and entitled person you are. Disgusted to be sharing this hobby with you.

Yes, I am an horrible and evil man. But I learned from the best. I once watched a Hitchcock movie the whole way through.

No, you're superman, capable of the impossible, and who purportedly can hear the difference when ordinary speaker wire is reversed.

There is a very good and known technical explanation for the why of such a claim, and when it is evaluated it is known to be a functional answer within the context of scientific validity.

I will do you the solid of telling you that it exists, so that you might go on and find it on your own, but I won't give it to you, as that information is valuable. Hard fought for, in most cases.

Commercial viability is many times tied to learned lore - as applied to product. Lore is protected, for all the right reasons.

The scenario stands as:..you seeming to collect a gaggle of yes men who are in the same boat, vs a largely silent group who understand the lore, the science and the engineering - and it's application to product.

Your voice, or position seems strong, due to the silence of intelligent, agreeable and wiser people.... who are wise enough to avoid the hassle that your position and voice represent.

You don't have a position. You have the appearance of a position--to some.

Even when telescopes suggested different the idea that the planets and the sun orbited around the earth was hard to abandon. The perplexing problem of the holy Trinity has occupied our 'finest' minds for centuries.

Even crazier... Einstein received death threats. From other scientists.

Good looking gear has always outsold high performance gear.

"The male of the species is a visual creature", one might say.

We have been asked multiple times to make our cables more ’pretty’ as they would be easier to sell, and more would be sold.

We have not, as every bit of prettiness and shininess we have at our disposal to add in, degrades sound quality. We (at Teo) can’t -and won’t- issue high quality cables with the ’shiny crow attractants’ involved, unless it is purely functional.

So far, for us, only the good looking WBT reference connectors have passed this high audio quality smell test.

We are very very good with cosmetics and visual appeal in product execution and design. The two of us (Taras and I - Ken) are well versed in such, with decades of experience. But there is little to be done in the cosmetics arena, with cables, if sound quality is the aim and outcome.