Are you sure that's your honest opinion?

I love stories like this, from Engadget:

....a group of 12 self-professed "audiophiles" recently couldn't tell the difference between Monster 1000 speaker cables and plain old coat hangers. Yeah, coat hangers. The group was A-Bing different cables, and unbeknownst to them, the engineer running the test swapped out a set of cables for coat hangers with soldered-on speaker connections. Not a single one was then able to tell the difference between the Monster Cable and the hangers, and all agreed that the hangers sounded excellent.

This is like the blind tests of wine where the £5 bottle of table plonk wins, or modern art prizes are won by 3 year old kids' sploshes, or bottled water tests are won by the bathroom tap....

(actually, as any audiophile knows, thickness of wire is the 80/20 of the quality, so it may not be that daft...)

The question I am always left with is why do people pay for this stuff when they probably know there is usually a rapid tailoff of benefit (if any) as price increases.

Which is why socio-economics is so fascinating - for example, experiments have shown that I we genuinely feel better about paying more. Of course this belief doesn't survive long IF you can compare things, but in areas where you can't..............

...which makes the internet so interesting, because increasingly things that once were un-comparable now can be via wisdom of crowd ratings, hot or not etc, and simple price discovery is easier than ever on pervasive electronic media.

In theory.

Its also a fact that we prefer comfortable lies to unpleasant truth, and the 'net has arguably become a megaphone for that, helped on by flacking behaviour (all those dodgy book reviews on Amazon for example). And we are hard-wired to be influenced by others, as any cursory inspection of our history as a species show....

Question is, which 'net is in the ascendant right now - the one that can discover the truth, or the one that can obfuscate it?