7500 for USED cables? Are they joking?

Mark admits to being out of audio for eight years. How many cell phones have been sold in that time? We are being bombarded DAILY with increasing amounts of rfi! I have found in my system the single ended cables sound as different from each other as components do. When using balanced, the difference is minimal. I have a/b'd $100.00 monster mic cables with $10,000.00 nordost Valhalla balanced in a $80k system. Barely percievable was the difference. Blindfolded doubt I could tell. Single ended anyone should be able to tell. -and while your ac is limited by the romax in the wall, what's the first thing your component sees? The cord coming out of it. Haven't we all see what happens to the TV when someone in the house using a different circuit turns on a vacumn or micro wave? I for one don't want that pollution getting to my stereo. Speaker cables as well are very suseptable to rfi.
Now, are these "tiffany cables" stupidly over priced? ABSOLUTELY! Some are quite costly to make, but by the time the distributer and retailer double and re-double the price it is totally out of line, there's NEVER a sale, or any nogotiation. Which is not to say these companies don't deserve to make a living. I like to physically see and hear a product in a store first. But perhaps if there were more direct sales manufacturers, the retail prices would experience downward pressure.
I have a fair amount of top monster cable products, while they aren't "fashionable", they do most of what the best cables are capable of, and I can justify the price, as they are aimed at the mass market. Another hi performing resonable price line is Custom Cable Company, they really blow away competitors for a fraction of the $.
For the record, I worked 20+ years as a live & studio engineer and performer, in the US & internationally. While I never got wealthy, I do spring for good cables in my home recording studio (16 track 2inch analog) as have an increasing number of my associates. Glass fiber optic cables for digital studios, etc.
Bottom line: we all have to live w/in our tax bracets, but to ignore the science of interference causing audiable artifacts and robbing fidelity from those who care about it is dening yourself greater enjoyment!

The $7500 price is outragest.
Very few items are in that price range, so you are talking extremes.
Don't discard something until you try it, Or in this case listen to it.
Suprising, Power cords on good equipment can make a large difference in the pleasure obtained listening to the equipment.
Power cords such as the Whale Elite and many , many interconnects cables allow the Components to sound as closly as they were designed.
Remenber, the phrase "it is only as good as the weakest link ?

Mark Hubbard, it is called the Voodoo...

Good cables do make a difference, but you do not need to spend thousands of dollars. Buy concert tickets instead. As I previously have posted, the people who are into the real thing fly to concerts. All this wiring extravaganza and Voodoo is for the wannabes.

There IS scientific basis for proper cabling, so here's a few links for you to use as reference:

1) http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/index2.htm

2) http://www.geocities.com/venhaus1/index.html

3) http://tnt-audio.com/clinica/tweaks.html

Regards,

To All,

This was educational on several levels. I expected more defensiveness and hostility, and instead received supportive and intelligent responses on both sides of the issue (sometimes from the same person). I also enjoyed the humor of "Rip Van Winkle" who thankfully stopped short of suggesting that I must have been incarcerated to have been out of touch for so long.

I certainly hear differences in single-ended cables (to which my experience is limited). Yes, even ten years ago we had choices in wiring, and as often as not a steep increase in cost reflected a marked decrease in sound quality (I'm remembering some expensive offerings from Tara Labs in particular that worked horribly in a friend's high end ARC/Genesis system). So in the last eight years, I take it that cables have not exactly become a science?

Certainly grungy mains, overloaded circuits and stray RF have the potential to degrade sound quality, but how much can shielding cost? There is a certain perverse logic in separating the transport from the D/A converter, for instance, only to require connecting the two with an expensive external "digital" cable instead of building the two components into the same chassis to begin with (and let's not get into outboard "jitter reducers," "naturalness restorers," stick-on discs and magic bricks, all of which admittedly affect the sound somehow).

I recently bought a $30 analog Mitsubishi MGA tuner in a plastic cabinet with fake heat-sink ridging on the sides and cheap built-in interconnects that looks like it might have been sold by Sears in 1971 for about what I just paid for it. The whole component must weigh close to four pounds and has a power cord so thin I wondered if I should shorten it. Yet the honest-to-goodness truth is that it completely blows away any other tuner I've ever owned, including the venerable Luxman T-117, which rose to Stereophile Class B, where it remained for as long as it was in production. It's scary how good this Mitsu is, especially when you start considering the *possibility* that our components could be designed to sound great using virtually any conductor of relatively nominal cost.

I appreciate the suggestions you have made, and I'll look into the more reasonably priced models you've mentioned. If you have other suggestions for wire that is priced at least somewhat proportionately to the components with which they'll be used, I'd love to hear about them. I was heartened to hear that people still buy Monster products, for instance.

By the way, a "high-end" reference mic cable that several studios are using is the B.L.U.E. Kiwi, which is the cable I referred to that costs $49.95. Lynn Fuston and 12 other engineers used it for their mic and mic preamp shootout CDs (3 CD set $110 delivered from 3DAudioinc.com). I don't know anything about "balanced" when it comes to playback -- is there any difference between a mic cable and a balanced interconnect?

Also -- another one you correctly identified -- the $125 mic cable I referred to is indeed made by Monster.

I'll tell you this -- I think a whole lot of intelligent, thoughtful people have joined the hobby in the last 8 years. You all are a cut above what I remember from the "letters" pages of Stereophile in the early 90s!

Again, thank you for the links and the advice, and for your patient and kind responses.

Sincerely,

Mark Hubbard

As far as pros go fewer and fewer are scoffing at quality cables because once you hear how much better your U67 sounds with even a $130 monster cable, you can't help but hear the improvement over a $20 pos cable. If the doubters stopped their chuckling and actually listened maybe they would churn out better sounding records.

P.S. Many major mastering facilities use high quality "audiophile" cables (Audioquest/MIT/Monster/AlphaCore/etc.) in their studios.