About eight years ago, I was given about eight single "high end" cables, gotten from a retailer going out of business. One was a well know speaker cable with a large, sealed box as part of the cable. This secret box was purported to give improved..(marketing hype). The secrets inside the box were exposed fairly easily with a DeWalt recip. saw. Inside, IIRC, were a couple of low value, cheap carbon resistors and similar quality capacitors. I'm no EE but tracing the signal path, it was straight through the box and the added "components" were wired to be non-functional. At that time, I think that they retailed for a couple of kilo-bucks.
A fairly pricey RCA inter-connect, after have the RCAs taken apart, revealed "cold" solder joints. At that time, I had a few Outlaw Audio interconnects that cost <$100. Their quality was as good as or better than the boutique. After that experience, I began to order high quality components and made my own.
Steve
