Who are the most underground high-end companies

I like the way you say don't squander your money on cables just yet. I take it from that comment that you feel cables are overrated. I have borrowed many cable from the cable company in Pennsylvania. Even though I can hear a difference in cables I am not always sure if one is better than the other. It is so subjective.

I also like when you said you can buy top rated tube gear for 10 percent of the cost of Mcintosh or Audio Research. It sounds like you have really done you're due diligence. 

Taters, I've paid dearly for due diligence. When I finally swore off the high-end (I should say high-advertised) stuff was when I paid air-fare to fly the Vandy dealer over here to "adjust" the 5AC speaks, drove 90 miles each way to the airport and back, bought him lunch, the whole smash. He spent all of 10 minutes with some Radio Shack gizmo to "centre" the Vandies and the rest of the day trying to push some $8k speaker cables on me. We did a swap-out with my Blue Jeans and I found myself, in my own damn living room, apologizing, that I could not hear a difference. Then I had to drive him back to the airport. Took me about a week to realize I was very angry, and started looking in to how this stuff is made and through the channels it is sold. Like I said, find out how hard it is to talk to the guy who actually makes the stuff, and deal directly with him/her. It has cost me at least 50 large to realize that for under 10 grand you can get the best sound out there, American built, and it will just tickle your ears.

I suspect a lot of folks don’t find differences between expensive high end cables and modestly priced or even cheap cables but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any differences, perhaps even big differences. It just could mean the experiment was flawed somehow or the system didn’t reveal the differences or the listeners were not as skilled at detecting differences as they perhaps believe or that there was a problem somewhere in the system. Or the cables were not installed in the right direction. No offense to anyone intended. Certainly differences would be expected to be smaller if the cables were not broken in or the cables under test were unplugged and plugged back in without sufficient time for the electro-mechanical interface to get properly reestablished. That’s why it’s sometimes a good idea to take any test results with a grain of salt or even throw them out, often they’re just outliers. That's also why The Amazing Randi feels quite secure offering $1 Million dollars to any senior audiophile who can hear the difference between expensive high end cables and Monster Cable in controlled blind tests.

I second yogiboy. Quicksilver is outstanding gear, and the people are great to deal with. A pair of Mid Monos is on my bucket list for upgrades.