Do you really need ultra expensive cables?

I was always told that you need to spend about 30-40% overall budget on cables to have good sounds. To some equiqment manufractures, that is not the case.

For those of you who visited McIntosh at HE 2003. What do you think about their Stereo set-up? Do you reallized that they spend less than 3% on cables? Not that they can't afford them. But their arguement was that if your equiqments are so nice, and so musical, why do you have to depends on cables to improve sounds. What do you think of that?

Thanks!