I enjoy good sound but cables and other snake oil tires me. You ever hear of mpingo discs?

I own a lot of blue jeans cable.

i agree that there's a lot of hype around certain cables and interconnects. the best thing to do is listen to them on your system, because there is no doubt that people (myself included) can hear differences in cables and interconnects. some are brighter, softer, harsher, etc.. and they do change over time as they conditioned, but then again so does your amp as it warms up and your speakers as they get broken in. if you doubt this well maybe your just not hearing it. some people just don't hear the difference and even prefer the sound from a hifi system bought at circuit city.
so what i'm trying to say is that there's a lot of subjectivity, independent of what any tests can measure...it's what you hear and what you like ;)

this said, i was a skeptic of such things as directional cables until i had the following experience.

i had been given for free some high end directional speaker cables. i set them up between my maggie mg3's and my bryston amps and was very happy with them for a couple of years. then one day i had a problem with my speakers so i sent them in to get serviced and i rented some other speakers for the month my beloved maggies were away.
at the time i was using the ext passive x-over for the maggies and was using several very short 1ft) sections of this high end wire, which i disconnected for the rented speakers.
when i got my maggies back i reconnected them and spent 2 days going crazy because i couldn't get them to sound balanced. for those of you unfamiliar with these speakers, location and placement are critical.
finally exasperated i decided to disconnect everything and reconnect, to discover that one of my short directional cables was in the wrong direction. incredulous, i flipped it and my maggies sounded heavenly again. the moral of this story...
just 'cause you can't experience it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

test it out. have a friend switch things for you and if you can hear the difference then you'll believe otherwise save the money and spend it on something else.

oh, and when my friend gifted me with silver speaker cables....ooh the soundstage improved, and... my powered digital cable between my cd transport and my anti-jitter device is superior to anything i have ever heard..

and maybe i'm fooling myself but who cares i love my 'audiophile' sound system and ... that's what audiophile means right? well isn't that what really matters?

one last thing...
few people are super tasters, genetically that is, and they can become enologists, others are very happy with 2 buck chuck, ot gallo wine which produces more wine each year than the entire country of italy

few have super smell and they create perfumes, others are happy with the stuff you can get a savon...

few people are olympic athletes, most are not..
few people can survive at the summit of mnt. everest without 02..most would die

get the picture?

"BTW, I work for Blue Jeans Cable"

thanks for cueing us into your conflict of interest.

Hey, all I gotta say about cables, like all other gear, you gotta test them out for yourself.

As per the science, a lot of what it boils down to is phase response. Your ear can sense incredibly small discrepencies in timing inaccuracies. These inaccuracies in addition to collapsing the stereo field also create comb filters. Every circuit is a capacitor. Capicitors are used in filtering/eqing. Does it not make sense to tune the circuit so that this filtering effect has a minimum impact?

Now, there are folks around these parts who want to tell me that high bandwidth MP3 files sound just as good as native, uncompressed CDs. Great. Enjoy your zipcord speaker wire as well. Me, I'm gonna stick with my Monacle XL.