Detlof, I have no qualms about anyone listening to anything and enjoying it. If someone gets pleasure from a Radio Shack or Wal-Mart rack system, that's more than fine with me. If someone thinks that a 12K cable is just the thing, so be it. My point being that things don't look the same, and are not the same, whether you are looking ahead, so to speak, and designing/building any element of a sound system or simply getting the end product and, ex-post facto, auditioning, analysing it. I think that it is dishonest to put out a product, make outlandish claims that cannot be substantiated and ask a price that is absolutely out of step with the cost of bringing the thing to market. When the upshot is that part of the ploy is to say that what you are selling is beyond any scientifically verifiable procedure, that nothing can prove or disprove your claims as a manufacturer, what you have is a situation where people will be had. Now whether they enjoy being had or not is another issue. I fully agree that live music is the yardstick against which to measure the performance of a sound system. I also agree that human hearing is the final arbiter of what constitutes a good system. What I cannot agree with is that our individual hearing is so different from one person to the next that anything goes. That we are not subject to so many vagaries in our ear/brain processor that any number of variables can be thrown in, helter-skelter, and that, somehow, the result will be of some value to more than the one individual listener. If someone wants to provide something significant to listeners in general (and I am not suggesting the population at large, but audiophiles in general) and make some contribution to advancing the state of the art, it has to be based on more than random possibilities and blind faith. Once the product is on the market, people are free to do what they want with it and to claim that it provides them with any manner of contentment. In closing, I have two thoughts: firstly, I believe that a guitar (and any other instrument, obviously) is just that, a musical instrument and, aside from the fact it needs to be tuned properly (and, hopefully, to stay that way for a while) has to be judged on its own merit, and that a sound system is not; the latter is a sound reproducing system and, therefore, there always is a standard to judge it by: the original sound, and, secondly, if cables are now seen as an acceptable means of fine tuning a system by, I guess, adding or subtracting something to make it more euphonic, why have audiophiles eschewed tone controls long ago as being low fi?
