Re: Cables again. For Arny, et al.

On Fri, 7 Mar 2008 16:46:45 -0800, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article <fqsnll02l6p@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>):

> "nebulax" <nebulax@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> news:fqpq7l0prp@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
>> BTW, please don't take my arguments to indicate that I'm
>> advocating spending $500+ a meter on cables, because I'm
>> truly not, and I couldn't afford to spend that much even
>> if I wanted to. One of the folks who I quoted, Roger
>> Sanders, is selling interconnects that he makes from
>> Belden video coax, and he's only charging $59 for a 5ft
>> pair, but even THAT is too expensive for me (right now
>> anyway). I wish the whole cable/sound issue wasn't even
>> an issue, but to my ears it is, and so I'm trying to find
>> the most economical way to sonic neutrality, that's all.
> 
> As a rule, the worst thing about the give-away interconnects that come
with 
> audio gear is the connectors, not the cable.  The cable itself is
inherently 
> sonically neutral when used in reasonable lengths, and with almost any
piece 
> of audio gear.
> 
> Coax can be used to make some very techhy-looking cables, especially
with 
> the right connectors. All that has nothing to do with sound, its all
about 
> appearances.
> 

Here is a related phenomenon that almost assuredly applies to this
situation 
as well:

 http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/du-cpw022908.php
 
                   Costly placebo works better than cheap one
    DURHAM, N.C. -- A 10-cent pill doesn't kill pain as well as a $2.50
    pill, even when they are identical placebos, according to a
    provocative study by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke
    University.
 
    "Physicians want to think it's the medicine and not their enthusiasm
    about a particular drug that makes a drug more therapeutically
    effective, but now we really have to worry about the nuances of
    interaction between patients and physicians," said Ariely, whose
    findings appear as a letter in the March 5 edition of the Journal of
    the American Medical Association.
 
    The results fit with existing data about how people perceive quality
    and how they anticipate therapeutic effects, he said. But what's
    interesting is the combination of the price-sensitive consumer
    expectation with the well-known placebo effect of being told a pill
    works. "The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating, least
    harnessed forces in the universe," Ariely said.