Snake oil... very expensive snake oil (Score 2, Interesting)

I've been a self described "audiophile" for quite a long time now, and it never ceases to amaze me just how much cash you can drop on upgrades for a sound or theater system. Speakers, woofers, tweeters, 2 way and 3 way setups, room design, cables, terminations, power cleaning... the list of products can go on and on forever. Some of these guys are really and truly nuts. I spent about 2 hours one day talking to an "expert" at a Tweeter and he firmly believed that due to the current flowing through the speaker wires you should have them elevated above the floor (on paper cups that are turned upside down and have a trench cut through them to support the wire) and leave them "at rest for at least a few days before pushing current through them to settle the magnetism radiating from them". The amount of money that can be spent on something as simple as speaker cables completely boggles the mind, and almost all of the marketing is spooky ghost stories about how this one works better than another one due to umpteen factors that nobody even really knows anything about. The problem is that it's difficult to scientifically PROVE that one cable isn't better than the other (at least as far as I'm aware), which is likely why he's put up this challenge. Proving the performance of a speaker cable beyond simply resistance, length and loss is hardly an exact science and often is open to the interpretation of the listener. Perhaps a blind test with a large amount of subjects would help but then you're still dealing with opinions which can hardly be substituted for fact.