Further robotrout's point: a friend of mine did some research on actual sound quality for generic versus high-price cables. He measured the noise floor with Mo

Further robotrout's point: a friend of mine did some research on actual sound quality for generic versus high-price cables. He measured the noise floor with Monster cables at about -160dB, whereas cheap crappy cables were about -125dB. However, he also found that basically all of the difference is explained by higher quality connectors on the Monster cables compared to his ultra cheap bargain basement ones; when he replaced the cheap connectors with some modestly priced RCA connectors that weren't utter shit (but were not Monster cable made), the two cables were indistinguishable. For the record, even -125dB is below the noise floor of arguably every person on earth. So really, the most important thing for cables is to always use good connectors. You cannot hear the difference between "super duper copper" and "layman's copper." Another popular bit of audiophile snake oil is "ribbon cables." These use wide, flat conductors instead of round ones because---they claim---the round conductors have higher impedance because of the skin effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect ). Of course, this is absolute bullshit, because skin depth at audio frequencies is more than the diameter of the round conductor. What's more, since ribbon cables aren't coaxial, they're actually more susceptible to EMI. ...and people still spend hundreds or even thousands _on_the_cable_!