You are correct; the point of gold plated contacts is anti-corrosion and long service life not for absolute highest conductivity.

I'm a ham radio operator; I have some silver-plated antenna connectors, because antenna feedlines are dealing with extremely weak signals on receive, so any loss you can eliminate in the connector the better. Problem is they corrode to hell everywhere they aren't tightly screwed together. For consumer AV equipment the signals are basically never weak enough to bother with that.

I would think most audiophiles know this?

They're not marketing to audiophiles. They're marketing to dudes and dads. They aren't trying to get the guy hooking a manual turntable up to a tube amplifier, they're trying to get the guy attaching a PS5 to an LG TV to a Sonos soundbar. They're going for the guy who is spending middle class money on AV equipment without bothering to understand it.

Wish I'd thought of it.

Unidirectional cables are very silly. I fixed a 300 foot unidirectional HDMI installed backwards during construction. I had to army crawl over ductwork.

Directional cables kind of make sense in an analogue, single-ended connection if it’s about the shielding being connected to ground only on one side… although I haven’t tried it in practice. Still, it has nothing to do with signal directionality, just noise rejection. The ground lift switch on some devices does the same.

It's called SCIENCE sweaty

Yes.

It's also for digital signals, so interference doesn't matter (up to the point it stops everything).

But hey, it also has a silver ABS grip.

But how many people do you think he used that line on and it sealed the deal?

I used to sell TVs for Best Buy back in the day. The Video Department manager, my boss, set up a display side by side to show the difference between $40 Monster cables and the normal cables that came with a DVD player.

When there was no noticable difference, he went into the TV settings and adjusted the settings for the normal cables to make the picture look like shit. Not all customers are that gullible though, so usually one of the more savvy ones would fix the settings. So my boss would have to go in and fuck the settings up again once or twice a shift.

It's for those occasions when there's a black hole passing through your house. Gotta be prepared.

Hey man, you realize everytime you turn on your stereo your couch starts sliding towards it?

This is a classic.

A few years back in a HiFi - fair there was a seller who pushed these fist sized wooden blocks that were meant to raise the cables off the ground and therefore "prevent the Earth itself from tampering with the signal".

So he was basically trying to sell very expensive magic wood.

That's a classic and I am glad it see it passed around again. The best part is the people that start delving into the snake oil absurdity that is "audiophile cables" before, you know, getting better actual speakers/headphones. Like for fucks sake, your $200 fancy cable isn't going to make your bullshit bargain bookshelf speaker into the voice of god. Just get some half way decent equipment and listen to your actual music.

To be fair, it was 4 coat hangers. The Monster cable was therefore outnumbered.

Installing cable TV at a man's house, ripped his Monster coax connector off. He was appalled! (I was appalled!) Showed him what I was replacing it with. Parts guide.

"The shield is quad-woven steel. Yours was 1x of angel hair copper. The dielectric is solid, not a noodle. See? (bendy, bendy) Foil shield? Uh, did yours have one? Oh, I see the shredded bit right there!"

Bent the center conductor on his Monster cable with my pinky. "Try that with mine." Stopped him before he hypodermic-needled himself.

tl;dr: Whatever the cable guy cuts for you is miles above Monster grade.

It's like Yeti gear. "So you paid $35 for a cup that's simply a vacuum sealed canister? I got a 6-pack off Amazon for $25. Cute colors too!"

Yes

Gold plated connections have a point, it prevents corrosion extending the life of the cable. Whether you think it worth that price is another thing entirely.

There's always been a group of audiophiles with more money than sense. To the point that "audiophile" almost feels like an insult to me, and I'm a man who...well...loves his audio. They should have a word for that.

Boneless Pizza ass moment

https://xkcd.com/641/

The cable is fiber optic, which is to say light. Light don't care about gold and silver. The highly polished lens bit is probably also bullshit, but at least light cares about lenses.

More generally, it’s not that cables are bad, it’s that audiophiles have way more money than sense. I’m not exaggerating when i say that I’ve seen short speaker cables sell for £6,000. Anything more than £5 will be of exactly the same quality as the £5 cable. You could maybe argue me up to £15-20.