I deeply beleive that, for non critical components, I.e Interconnects, speaker wire. People hear better sound depending on the knowlage of how much he or she spent on the said item. I also would wager that with non critical listeners image of a particular component and probably size can have a major influence on perceived sound quality.
Funny enough; after several years of spending more and more money on different cables as well as building them for a local designer, we found some very inexpencive wire that we both prefered for speaker wire, interconnects and internal hook-up wire.
We both knew this wire had the "wrong" metal, "wrong" dialectric and was very cheap, but the improvement over the very expencive (and very good sounding) silver we had been using was undeniable. Btw it took us about 2 years just to find the right sounding silver too.
