Things I've learned and seen since being involved with this hobby and industry. I have been involved in this hobby since the early 1980's and offering High End cables since 2012. One thing that stands out to me is...Everyone has their own unique tastes and everyone has their own unique sound that they are looking for. My own personal choice is Tube Gear with Vintage Tannoy Gold Monitors. I would never say that my choice is the best, but it is the one that I enjoy the most, and I have listened to, and have owned a lot of well known gear over the years.
The current status in the industry (In my opinion) is that it's flooded with options, most of them with obscure designs and descriptions and almost all of them are extremely overpriced. When it comes to wire, plugs and connectors there are only so many options and suppliers available. I have literally contacted a handful of well known wire manufacturers and asked the question...Is there any NEW technology when it comes to wire, and every single one of them replied...NO. You have Stranded and Solid Core, Shielded or Non Shielded available in assorted Metals. After that you're just rearranging how it's placed inside of the jacket. Does that actually change the sound, some say yes, some say no. I'm not trying to say that there aren't some great products out there, but what I am saying is people are charging and paying a whole lot more than they need to. There isn't a piece of wire in existence that has a cost of more than a few dollars a foot, so why are people charging and paying 100's of dollars per foot. Now, Speaker Cables and Interconnects are very labor intensive to produce, so a higher selling price makes sense in that category. But if you look at the cost of actual plug sets, there are only a few options as far as metals and then you have the assorted body styles. While some people are very brand loyal, if you really knew the ins and outs of the industry, you'd learn that all exotic metal plugs are produced overseas, the U.S. does NOT produce anything in exotics, only brass. I have purchased many brand name plug sets to compare them to the plugs that we use, and I have yet to find any substantial differences. This is a true story, I ordered plugs from one of my regular suppliers, they come to me factory sealed and packaged individually. While building our cables and opening the plugs one by one we found that some were labeled with our manufacturer's name and some were labeled Furatech, both from the exact same batch, what does that tell you??? The same goes for other well known manufacturers . Again, I'm not trying to bad mouth or down play the competition, I'm only telling you what I've seen. Here's another way to look at it, our BIG 3 automakers are all separate companies. But the companies that build parts for them produce for all 3, not just one. Starters and alternators all come off of one production line and then go to all 3 automakers, not just one. Do you see what I'm saying here???
I'll close with this, please don't think that just because we aren't asking an arm and a leg for our products that our items are substandard. We're committed to using the best quality materials we can find, without getting ridiculous, and offering you a product that will outperform our competitors products costing 3-10 times as much. Within the industry we've been told that we need to raise our prices because we're making our competitors look bad, but we're happy where we're at and we have only had 1 price increase in the 9 years that we've been in business. So as the Headline says...
Take it "For What It's Worth".
