You can bet your bottom dollar that there was a special deal cut between ANY cable manufacturer and recording studio, etc. if that recording studio's name or personnel names appears in an advertisement, press release, or marketing release. Quid Pro Quo. Want to bet that the studio either bought the cables at "cost," got them for nothing, or have them installed at no charge (on loan)? You bet that there is no special deal - you lose. It's called professional courtesy or trade discounting. It is done all the time. (Speaking of reference cables - Atma-Sphere, as I said before, makes their own "reference" cables from Belden pure copper microphone wire. A lot of DIY's swear by it). One last thing - most of the recordings of CD's today are better than a few years ago, but they could be much better still. Five more years and they'll be there - and you should be able to take advantage of their sonic superiority to today's recordings with your NEW audio system (CD transport/DAC). Cables won't make much difference in the final product (during recording) - software and post processing are where the "secret sauce" is at when making a recording sound the way it (finally) does. And post-processing is just software in the digital domain. The upsampling/oversampling schema of today is child's play compared to the algorithmic development of tomorrow. Cables don't even enter into the recording equation at that point, which is just a little less than they do today. Remember in recording CD's - it is bits and bytes in the digital domain. As long as the data gets from one point to another uncorrupted, that is all you need. Then you can post process it all you like. Why do you think there is so much lip-synching going on these days by "stars"?
