why do people feel the need to buy expensive cable

Blah blah. Blind test. Some can’t tell some can tell. You have to have the ear. Or more importantly your own ear 

HDMI cables do NOT carry anything that in any way resembles an audio or or video signal. Try piping the raw output of your favorite movie soundtrack from an HDMI cable into an amp. I promise you won't hear music. The data coming through an HDMI cable is low level machine language. Nothing more. It might as well be a text recipe for cheesecake. I'm sorry if you think you're seeing and hearing something more with some crazy priced HDMI cable. If you'd just read the specs for the technology you'd know it's impossible and what you're really hearing or seeing is purely in your imagination. 

We don't feel the need to buy expensive cables, we feel the need to improve our system.

jandewitt - We don't feel the need to buy expensive cables, we feel the need to improve our system.

+1

It's analogous to going to a hardware store and asking for a 1/4 inch drill bit. What you want is a 1/4 inch hole.

costco_emoji,

It doesn’t matter whether the information carried by HDMI cables is electrical pulses or rabbits. They are still audio and video signals. You know, like digital satellite signals, they are audio and video signals. I didn’t say they were analog signals.  The signal, whether the information is digital or analog is an electromagnetic wave. As such it’s subject to the same rules as any signal traveling through any cable or wire, e.g., purity and construction of conductor, purity and construction of connectors, dielectric material, susceptibility to RF, and “directionality” of the wire. That’s why Audioquest “controls directionality” of their high end HDMI cables, like the Carbon I use, as well as all of their other high end cables and power cords. It’s not a commie plot or an elaborate trick to fool gullible rich kids.