Exactly. There's a lot of wackos out there in the music biz though. People have religious beliefs about certain products/technologies/sounds without any solid reasoning behind it.
I suspect that the $150 cable is there to make the $15 cable look like the "reasonable" or "middle of the road" choice.
(from experience, the $1.50 cable works just fine.)
Aside: Anybody else remember $50 6' USB A-B cables?
I think that's just the best buy/office depot "minimum price"
Fry's is one of those places that targets, well, me; They are more expensive than monoprice, but not by so much that I would delay a project to get the monoprice price.
I think they are pretty good at pricing high enough that they are making some money (I mean, I /expect/ to pay more in person) but low enough that I can still go in and buy a hundred cables for a project without it being thousands of dollars.
Though I should just shut up. I use a Topre Realforce now and most would consider the cost to be excessive.
The price point for decent cables isn't high, it's just not the absolute cheapest cables. I'd probably exceed the spec for long runs or noisy environments, too. I mainly go with monoprice for short, and blue jeans cable for longer.
Every objective test that I've seen though with tested-good HDMI cables shows no difference until that 30' mark. The HDMI licensing board recommends that past 30' you use signal amplifiers or HDMI-to-Ethernet anyway.
Maybe out past 10' you'd want to worry about cable insulation? I haven't been in a situation to worry about it yet. At 2m I'd think any cable that doesn't sync is defective. I'm not interested in paying 10x-100x the price for higher manufacturing quality control standards.
My little $100 tripath amp and the cheap but appropriate speakers that I picked for it absolutely smoke a lot of $3000 amps (and similarly expensive speakers) that I come across and people tend to not believe unless they're blindfolded (and still try to poo-poo it when they find out how little my setup cost).
Also it crushes my spirit when people have some $10k HiFi setup and the speaker placement/room accoustics aren't right at all.
These people go out claiming these things as fact...and unfortunately there's an entire industry out there supporting and benefiting from their claims.
Seems to me that there is something people want - a better audio experience. They may actually get that by paying more, but the preferable outcome would be to get better objective quality. In fact, I think it would be preferable to even pay more to get the better objective product and know you weren't duped. I think there is probably a market for consulting:
value1 = objective_value1 + value_of_knowing_you_werent_duped
value2 = objective_value2 + cognitive_bias_for_paying_more
If it's true that objective_value2 is actually << objective_value1, and cognitive_bias_for_paying_more is not too significant, value_of_knowing_you_werent_duped could be a lucrative business.
It could be anything in that bottle at that point, but the emotions of that holistic experience are what matter.
Things that are just peoples perceptions (like "brightness") have technical terms (amplitude of harmonics).
Sound engineers aren't doing black magic. If you reduce dynamic range too much through compression you can end up with a sound that people find "boring".
I'm sorry but there are things that very quantifiably sound terrible.
(I am a musician, I have run live sound and mix my own music.)
What I mean though is there are certain aspects that can't be reduced to technical terms- like going to listen to a live performance from an artist who isn't going to perform any longer or listening to a piece on a rare, hard to produce system. The value isn't coming directly from the technical aspects of the production for the listener at that point.
I reserve wacko purely for people who claim performance benefits from things which cannot be proven or measured in any way...or are provably false.
No need for words like wacko and religious. Unless of course you doing mind if I fire back with a few judgmental words of my own?
It is a very reasonable thing to prefer record over CD. They have different sounds, people have different likes, easy, done.
But if someone tells you they prefer the look of HDMI when you use gold-plated wires, they're clearly deceiving themselves, because as a digital signal there is no difference whatsoever.
So the important question to ask is whether people can hear the difference. I will accept that some people have better/different ears from others, but the best way to demonstrate that ability is a double-blind test.
Your standard is what 'sounds right'. Well, if you can reliably tell me that X technology sounds better than Y technology, without labels on the two sets of headphones in front of you, then great, that's all I wanted. I don't need any kind of research showing that a format is objectively 'better'. I just want someone to show that it's objectively different to human ears.
If someone says they have a preference, but doesn't actually prefer either one in a blinded test, then the labels 'wacko' and 'religious' fit.
So many musicians end up developing biases about what certain equipment is supposed to sound like. There are a few videos floating around comparing guitar amp/cab modeling gear to the real thing. A lot friends of mine have trouble picking them apart or getting them right in a blind listening test. Frequently the model has some tweaks that make it sound better... or a better description would be to say that it sounds more like what the musician expects that gear to sound like. Some amp X was used on such and such album and has Y sound and the model sounds like that amp does on the album.
I'm frequently right in these blind tests and I end up telling people is that it's because I don't care about the gear and don't have any preconceived notions about what it should sound like. I just listen to the timbre and make my best guess.
You and I can disagree about whether impressionism is a "good" style of painting. The art world spent a good deal of energy debating that point. That is something which is subject to taste. But if you say "yes" and I say "no" to the question of whether van Gogh created his impressionist painting on canvas, then only one of us can be right. In this case, my insistence that van Gogh didn't paint on canvas would put me squarely in the loony or wacko category.