why do people feel the need to buy expensive cable

If I can hear a big difference and can truly afford it, it's worth it.
If I can't hear much of a difference or can't afford it, it's not worth it.
Is it a good value? Never. That is the nature of Luxury.
I think no-one here is saying luxury cables are value packed. We're saying that in Our system to Our ears there is a big difference, or not.
Some refuse to allow that written-in-stone, logic-based assumptions could be derailed by audio reality. And that's a shame because it is one of the biggest handicaps you can have in this crazy hobby/obsession. Some things that shouldn't work really do matter. The flip side of that is being a sucker. The snake oil is out there and it flies in the face of logic too. The smart audiophile uses his ears and concludes what is right or wrong for His system. None of this is new information. We all know it. What this thread is really about is pride and trash talk. No-one can prove anything.

After 17 years as an audiophile, the key is honestly to try lots of different types of cable at different price points, because the results are so system dependent. In my pretty respectable system with a Levinson amp and preamp, Revel Studios, PS audio PWD, the best sounding interconnects and speaker cables came from Patrick Cullen at Cullen Cable, and thats after trying several $1k+ speaker cables and interconnects. In previous systems over the years, I compared boutique budget cables of those days to high end stuff and the high end stuff won, so you just have to be open minded and trust your ears.

Jimmywho gets it. 🏆

Mmm,seems like the community is coming to an agreement here.

Garebare,

I know the mark ups on cables is crazy! But even the mark up on speakers is very high. I was having a discussion with a friend of mine on what it cost to build certain speakers. (Not to pick on a certain manufacturer) but we were discussing Wilson audio. He figures it cost 20 percent of retail to build a speaker. So for an example. If the Alexia retails for 52k than their cost should be around 10k. I would say that is a very big markup from manufacturing to retail.