Most overpriced audio component made

How ironic you should place this topic up for discussion. I recently met a person at a dealer show who for many years designed audio cables for a very hi end well know audio cable company who shall remain unnamed . He told me that audio cables are one of the highest marked up products in the market! And to prove his point he offered to design new audio cables for my system for comparison of course i agreed to let him .Well let me tell you i have the top of the line cardas interconnects and speaker cables golden 5s, So i was pretty confident his point would be moot, well let me tell ya im placing my cardas up for sale the entire set! Boy dont i feel like the fool i paid $4,000 for the cardas his price $700.00 guys there is something to to be said about custom cables. Don't fall for the advertising hype of cable companys who by the way pay to advertise in all the leading magazines just who do those reviewers work for again ? advertisement pays the bills and we should never forget that save your money !!!!

Speakers selling above $2000 certainly qualify as do some tube amps. Most of all SE low power types. Price out the components and you will be shocked. The manufacturer buys these things for a lot less then retail so the price disparity is even greater. You of course pay for the engineering, brand , dealer markup, advertising and boxes to name a few. Dealers who insist on charging full retail on a mailorder sale are also being unreasonable. Just remember the used audio market is the place to be in terms of value. You may not be able to buy the latest audio toy but a 40%-50% cost to open the package the first time is a high price to pay.

They might be worth the money sonically, but if you wan tto talk mark-up over cost, audio racks are way up there.

Cables, power cords? Of course! But that's like shooting fish in a bucket. As far as I'm concerned, any gadget or doohickey from Shun Mook takes the prize (they go one better than cables: the cable jacket!). Product price truly reflective of cost: Avantgarde speakers. When one thinks of how much research went into them, and then investment they had to make to build the dies that are used to cast their horns, they seem like a bargain. What do many speaker manufacturers do other than buy an assortment of drivers, resistors, capacitors and inductors, and then mix and match them in a wood box? Sure they spend a lot of time listening to their speakers and tweaking them, but how much is their time worth relative to the investment those speaker manufacturers that build their own drivers have to make?

I totally agree with the statement by definitive above. i have a friend who owns a hi-end store. He showed me a book on some well known brand of cables. I bought a pair for over 60% off,and he showed me the mark down in the book the dealers give them,he told me he still makes money even at that price.Cables are the biggest mark up for dealers and where they make the most money by far. I'm guessing that they make 70 to 80%. all this cable stuff is a bunch of hype. $500 here $2000 there. next time you spend that kinda of money on cables, just remember the person you got them from is pocketing 80% profit!