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Why do decent audio cables cost so much?

James said:
There is a hierarchy of what matters, and in my estimation, it starts with the room, followed by loudspeakers, then amplifier and source components. Cables are near the bottom for the reasons I outlined earlier. It is probably why my entire rig is wired with Mogami cables. It's simply good enough to deliver the macro-goodness.
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I'd put AC power ahead of loudspeakers, as if your power is dirty and connected on the same line as your microwave, washing machine, dishwasher etc you'll get rubbish in, rubbish out. I live in an apartment building, so that problem is even worse. In my case, I wasn't able to change the original wiring scheme, and retrofitting dedicated 20a lines back to an audiophile grade distribution box and ground would have been very messy and prohibitively expensive to retrofit. So I use a Gigawatt power conditioner which cleans up the power, provides robust surge protection and improves impulse response, along with a QSA red/black AU-spec wpo in lieu of a $10 Bunnings job.
 
Muttley2 said:
The OP asked a legitimate question which seems to spark some ridiculous comments but many failed to even bother attempting to answer.
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I guess the word "decent" is very much open to interpretation? For me decent cables makes me think of tried and tested (pro?) stuff from Mogami, Belden and the like. If you check the Mogami website you get every conceivable specification there is plus cross-section etc. Quite a few in this thread have opined that "decent" cables are in fact not very expensive. May be about semantics then?
 
Muttley2 said:
9 pages and counting. I couldn't care less how much people want to spend on a cable its their choice. The OP asked a legitimate question which seems to spark some ridiculous comments but many failed to even bother attempting to answer. CJ 14 gave a good insight but seemed to get lost in the noise of "I can't hear any difference"
If cables are of no interest why bother contributing just to stir sh%t. Over the years I have found some cable are better than others, take it or leave it.
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That is a dastardly comment Muttley, but true. Hence why I deleted my earlier contributions as they were triggering the usual suspects, who in turn derailed the entire thread.
 
If you look at the thread title then it's probably not going to be pro cable so maybe it's 'believers' who should avoid? The thread questions why they cost so much, it is not about belief or otherwise surely?

My contention that people who spend a lot of money on cables are mugs still holds.
 
Maybe the question is pro cable, with some expectation that people believe 5k for 1m of wire can be justified on material costs and r and d?
 
Muttley2 said:
9 pages and counting. I couldn't care less how much people want to spend on a cable its their choice. The OP asked a legitimate question which seems to spark some ridiculous comments but many failed to even bother attempting to answer. CJ 14 gave a good insight but seemed to get lost in the noise of "I can't hear any difference"
If cables are of no interest why bother contributing just to stir sh%t. Over the years I have found some cable are better than others, take it or leave it.
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I we are allowed to hear differences or not, why are we not allowed to talk about it?
odd rules you have.
 
James said:
I guess the problem is reconciling perception (subjective) with specification or measurement (objective) as it is impossible to explain every aspect of performance. So round and round we go with the circular arguments. We also like different things, so what's good and important to you may be completely irrelevant to another.
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Yes, I certainly appreciate that but this problem is only relevant if you're very sure that you've measured everything that there is to measure. Almost certainly you will have missed something. There is a channel on YouTube called Veritasium that explores science based questions. They did a whole video on how electricity propogates in wires (see here -
) and how it doesn't 'flow' so much as create a field of energy around the cable and yet even this video generated huge controversy, with claims that this explanation is wrong.

The point is this - it's entirely possible that the subject is not well understood enough for us to be very sure that our measurements represent everything that there is to be measured. What's more likely, that we have missed something important about the nature of electrical flow/propogation/transfer whatever it is in wires, and that we aren't fully measuring everything there is to be measured, or that, en masse, every single audio engineer working in the design, fabrication and sale of audio cables (and all other associated equipment), along with at least half of everyone who calls hifi a hobby is labouring under the same mass delusion?
 
I have collected a few rca cables over the years, priced from 20 to 490, although the more expensive ones were bought secondhand.

cheap:
qed performance audio - makes my system sound as dull as dishwater.

better:
chord c line
chord clearway
atlas element achromatic

what I would call expensive:
vdh the sea
vdh the rock

In my experience, the more expensive cables do sound better.
the only curved ball might be the chord clearway. they are infused with the ability to make your music sound more lively and engaging without being bright, they do however sound a bit 'shiny' in the mids. which can still become tiresome.

When I first started buying hifi, i was a cable skeptic. then one day I decided to give it a go and spend around £40 on a pair of chord c line cables. After hearing the difference I was converted.
 
rontoolsie said:
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.
SubCable.jpg

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?
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The profit margins on cables are horrible in the highend business. Thats why some cables are expensive.

However - cables sounds slightly different and one has to take this seriously if you want really good sound.
The cheapest cable possible is not usually the best sounding cable.
The best cables I have heard in different systems are the Linn k20 loudspeaker cable and the Focal elite 1 meter RCA cable. Both are rather affordable and they can improve the sound on most systems. Small but important differences.
 
timpy said:
Some cables take a lot of man hours to make, you haven't mentioned that.
Not every final product is the result of an output of a machine.
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I know the Lessloss Audio Stellar power cables take atleast 30 hours to make one cable, incl: hand-braiding.
 
sq225917 said:
Mains cables do nothing for noise, abslutely zero..
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Yes. This thread comes down to what goal(s) someone has for a cable and how much it costs to achieve those goals. If one of the goals is to do some filtering, including filtering noise, then trying to do that with a cable is usually not a great idea however costly it is. That's because:
  • The primarily technical goal of a cable is to transmit power or signals, not filter them, so if a cable does any form of filtering it is a side-effect;
  • The side-effect will be minimal compared to what a real filter can do - one that has been designed to be a filter;
  • The side-effect will be unpredictable as it will depend on the source-end impedance, the cable impedance and the destination-end impedance and how these vary with frequency, which are all largely unknown and/or unpredictable.
If someone needs a filter (e.g. for noise) then the right thing is to use a filter that is designed for the purpose - it's unreasonable to expect a cable, however costly, to be predictable or do as good a job.
 
Only recent cable test was XLR QED vs my pro interconnects, ~12 meter run into actives. Clear difference. Cables do sound different, if they are different, the difficulty is deciding what's correct. I preferred the pro cables in this case. With a short run or different environment maybe the difference would be small or a different decision, but I can only report my impression.
 
Bodhi said:
I'd put AC power ahead of loudspeakers, as if your power is dirty and connected on the same line as your microwave, washing machine, dishwasher etc you'll get rubbish in, rubbish out. I live in an apartment building, so that problem is even worse. In my case, I wasn't able to change the original wiring scheme, and retrofitting dedicated 20a lines back to an audiophile grade distribution box and ground would have been very messy and prohibitively expensive to retrofit. So I use a Gigawatt power conditioner which cleans up the power, provides robust surge protection and improves impulse response, along with a QSA red/black AU-spec wpo in lieu of a $10 Bunnings job.
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Power conditioners may clean up noise in your AC, but they will have higher output impedance that could choke high-power amplifiers. I accept they are fine for source components.

I had the luxury of designing and building my house, including specifying a separate AC supply for my music room.
 
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