Pick up a college textbook on transmission lines. Forget the forum discussions, sales rhetoric and rantings. After you've perused an engineering textbook, you probably won't care to enter into forum discussions about audio cables.

"Uh, will a gold plated ligature give me a better tone than my silver plated one?"

Now, guys, a ligature, to a woodwind player, is a device that is nothing more than a glorified hose clamp, whose purpose is to hold the reed to the mouthpiece. That is all it does.

There are many ways to make the gullible spend a lot of money... and because they spent a lot of money, there MUST be an improvement, right? Can't you hear it? Well, Mr. Golden Ears, if you can't, you just are not hip, sophisticated, or whatever is the current word.

Remember bricks, granite blocks, etc on top of amplifiers?

And green markers on CD's?

I remember when people could swear that CD's, since they were recorded in digital, sounded "grainy" and harsh, and could never equal the sound of good vinyl.

The list goes on....