Yet one can pay £2.5k per meter for so called "top end" interconnects. Do I smell snake oil?
That entire sector was like a blind mans bluff when I was working in Auditions. We used to call it magic cables. Not in a nice way. The magic was all your money disappeared and you were usually left wondering where it went and why.
Some examples.
We had two listening rooms, one mid range and one high end. The high end was usually left plugged in, warm and ready to connect with the exception of speakers which could be heard if they were in room allegedly. The main sales rep from Exposure was a very straight talking chap called Kevin and he was from Yorkshire so was not inclined to try and paint things wrongly. One day we had some spare time and he came in and said he wanted to use us to do a blind listening test on some products he was going to release. We put our favourite system together and listened to three tracks a few times to get used to them. He then came in and we did the eye mask thing. He played the track four times and we all picked the second as the best. Same again on the second record - we all went for the same option saying it sounded more open and lighter with extra detail. Same for third track. We were wondering what this new super product was that could get an extra 20% out of the system. Roksan t/table arm and cartridge, Naim active amp stack, Naim SBL speakers. We were going to sell the living bits out of it!
He had three things in front of him and we heard four auditions......
1. £350 pre-power cables from a new company (Cable-Talk)
2. An acoustic mat that went under the turntable and apparently damped feedback letting the Roksan work better, £600 to you sir.
3. A mystery box which we had chosen on every track......we were not going to find out today but he would tell us shortly.
4. The fourth was the system as we had it as a benchmark. In general it had come second or sometimes third from our marks which was interesting. We used the Naim mid-range cabling.
Any way three weeks later he comes in and gets us to try one more check, we were all happy. He said he would sell it to us at £150 trade and the retail was £250 per unit. We said yes. It was the box.
It was literally the white foam that had been used to pack a PC into a shipping box, he liked the properties of the foam end packing and literally just put it under his CD and was stunned by the improvement. He thought he was losing his mind and so asked us to do the test! We never had the nerve to do it but I still think we could have made a fortune. It was this stuff.
https://www.efoam.co.uk/closed-cell-polyethylene-foam.phpWe spent one slow afternoon trying out about 12 different types of speaker cable on the same Roksan/Naim system. One was slightly brighter, a couple had a little more clarity (£300/m) but compared to spending £300 on other stuff not really worth it in our experience above £30/m. Then Kevin came back in again and upset us. He got some thick (30amp?) household ring mains twin-n-earth and just used the two main conductors for speaker cable and it sounded wonderful. Nuts. It was not just the cheapest contract stuff to be fair but it was a lot better than most of the others we had in the shop. Bass became way more individual in note and depth, clarity was open but treble was a little less sweet. It was solid core 30 amp mains cable! a little like this
https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/electrical-mains-power-cables/4939766/ He grounded the middle earth cable additionally.
There were loads of things we got up to in order to learn what did and did not work.
It turned out that Kevin had previously worked as a power supply line engineer for National Grid and so had some form in this area. He then went on to setup Cable Talk which became Talk Electronics the cable supplier and later equipment company. It was good stuff, we sold a chunk of it.
https://talkelectronics.com/talk-cables/ His bread and butter speaker cable was great value for mid range systems.
