1. Do you believe that expensive cables are worth it?

A. When defining an interface or interconnect, do you look for more than resistance, capacitance, inductance, coupling proximity to other conductors, resistance to corrosion and insulation strength, etc.?

Where I work, the sparkys worry about Type I cable. They figure ampacity, debate the merits of going cable tray or duct bank, they do trade-off studies of voltage vs. transformers vs. circular mils and worry if direct-buried will deteriorate due to inadequate jacketing.

Then there's Type II cable. The application for Type II cable is exclusively in consumer audio. Type II cable is insensitive to ampacity, resistivity, dielectric constant, etc... Type II cables may vary in capacitance, or self inductance, or myriad other demonstrable properties, but those properties are irrelevant.

In Type II cable production cost bears no relationship to retail price, nor should it. The cost can only be evaluated in terms of how it makes the purchaser feel. Like a Prada handbag or a Louis Vuitton shoe, Type II cable is purchased for its intangibles, not its functionality.

As for the cable itself, that is probably a different matter. There was a big discussion (fight) that broke out on one of the other sites where one guy claimed a high-end cable was actually a standard product by Belden or someone, and that the only difference was the sales tag.

I saw this and thought to myself that the person reporting this information might have an axe to grind. But maybe not. The other side might have had an agenda, who knows. It just all seems to get way out of hand on something like that. This is especially true on the site where the "discussion" broke out, since one of its main goals is to promote controversy in order to increase traffic. If you watch the Jerry Springer show, you expect to see fights. And you kind of know that most of them are made up fights, pure fiction with play-actor participants.

But setting aside the controversy and reasons for it to be generated, the matter is really limited to a discussion about the merits of specific cables. I see this as sort of like talking about bolts. We can talk yield and tensile strength, corrosion resistance, etc. There are some things to consider when choosing a fastener, just like there are some things to look at when picking the right cable. But once a cables discussion starts getting weird, I tend to tune it out. It's definitely a "get a life" topic in my eyes, once we get past the (relatively simple and easy to describe) physical characteristics.