rontoolsie
pfm Member
As far as I can tell the cost of audiocables are based on several parameters:
Production cost-which may include expensive parts such as OCC copper, pure silver or an exotic mixture of silver, gold and palladium. The dielectric and stipulated geometry may also be spendy...foamed Teflon costs more than PVC.
R&D costs- some companies like Siltech employ full time PhDs in metallurgy to advance their research. This is not cheap.
Distribution Costs- Most wires (apart from the plethora on AliExpress) are not sold factory direct, so go through a distributor /dealer network. This can increase the final retail price by 2-4x. Or more.
Advertising- full page ads in high circulation magazines are unofficially needed to get a review in certain high-circulation journals; and without a glowing review, most punters will look elsewhere.
Perceived cost/performance ratio: While some people set an upper price limit on what they are willing to spend, others set a lower price limit on what they are willing to consider...so someone with $250k Wilson speakers will not even glance at some $400 speaker cables; so they will start their hunt for speaker cables in the $10k+ bracket.
Pride of Ownership: There is a warm fuzzy feeling people get when they KNOW that their wires cost ultra-premium prices.
Profit: All businesses are in business to make money. The dealer markup on cables tends to be higher than those on amps/speakers.
The most expensive industrial cable is that transoceanic submarine cable.
Submarine cable image
This is very expensive...how expensive is very expensive???? Oh, around $50 per (mono) meter. But you can see where your money is going. The copper alone in this would be tens of $ per meter.
EDIT the $50/m is the cost of fiber optic cable....the cable pictured above is power cable and costs $2500/m
In contrast, the much less impressive looking Transparent Magnum Opus speaker wire is around $13,000 per mono meter.
This is more than 250x as expensive as the submarine cable above. And I am virtually certain that it costs a fraction to produce.
If somebody produced a cable that sounded as good as the Transparent for $5/m, would anybody actually buy it, or would preconceived bias shut it out of the market. Dealers would not push it, because their profit on even a 10m stereo pair would be no more than $50.
In my subjective cable experiments I found some wires to offer large subjective improvements over others, and those were not necessarily the more expensive ones. I have had some 5-figure cables on extended loan that were no better (yet no worse) than my $400 ones.
Can ANYBODY partially justify why some $1k+ wires are actually WORTH that?....anybody?
Production cost-which may include expensive parts such as OCC copper, pure silver or an exotic mixture of silver, gold and palladium. The dielectric and stipulated geometry may also be spendy...foamed Teflon costs more than PVC.
R&D costs- some companies like Siltech employ full time PhDs in metallurgy to advance their research. This is not cheap.
Distribution Costs- Most wires (apart from the plethora on AliExpress) are not sold factory direct, so go through a distributor /dealer network. This can increase the final retail price by 2-4x. Or more.
Advertising- full page ads in high circulation magazines are unofficially needed to get a review in certain high-circulation journals; and without a glowing review, most punters will look elsewhere.
Perceived cost/performance ratio: While some people set an upper price limit on what they are willing to spend, others set a lower price limit on what they are willing to consider...so someone with $250k Wilson speakers will not even glance at some $400 speaker cables; so they will start their hunt for speaker cables in the $10k+ bracket.
Pride of Ownership: There is a warm fuzzy feeling people get when they KNOW that their wires cost ultra-premium prices.
Profit: All businesses are in business to make money. The dealer markup on cables tends to be higher than those on amps/speakers.
The most expensive industrial cable is that transoceanic submarine cable.
Submarine cable image
This is very expensive...how expensive is very expensive???? Oh, around $50 per (mono) meter. But you can see where your money is going. The copper alone in this would be tens of $ per meter.
EDIT the $50/m is the cost of fiber optic cable....the cable pictured above is power cable and costs $2500/m
In contrast, the much less impressive looking Transparent Magnum Opus speaker wire is around $13,000 per mono meter.
This is more than 250x as expensive as the submarine cable above. And I am virtually certain that it costs a fraction to produce.
If somebody produced a cable that sounded as good as the Transparent for $5/m, would anybody actually buy it, or would preconceived bias shut it out of the market. Dealers would not push it, because their profit on even a 10m stereo pair would be no more than $50.
In my subjective cable experiments I found some wires to offer large subjective improvements over others, and those were not necessarily the more expensive ones. I have had some 5-figure cables on extended loan that were no better (yet no worse) than my $400 ones.
Can ANYBODY partially justify why some $1k+ wires are actually WORTH that?....anybody?
Last edited:
