I listened to a system yesterday, which uses some kind of expensive cables, cable stands, expensive Class A mono block amplifiers, very nice speakers, a nice turntable and cartridge and a different preamp from the one he had been using. Since he has worked in the Audio business for decades, he has saved tons of money on his investment but I would guess that it's in the high five figures even with the discounts.
When I mentioned that one speaker was closer to his main listening position, he said they had recently cleaned the carpet and that he hasn't placed the speakers where they had been but he had raved about his newest speakers in the past. He has two other pairs of expensive speakers in the room, as well as two large-ish subwoofers that aren't being used- the speakers have a jumper connecting the positive and negative terminals, which prevents the cones resonating because of the sound from the speakers that are being used (JBL and some other manufacturers ship their larger drivers with a jumper to prevent damage from rough handling).
To be honest, I'd rather listen to my system. The balance of frequency response and perceived image/sound stage are much better and, while he doesn't use his system for video in any way and we didn't listen to any mono music or speaking, mine places the sound dead center between my speakers and human voice is very natural.
I used speaker cable that was cut off when I did an installation, so it could be called 'scrap'.
While I spent some time placing my speakers and used Room EQ Wizard to do this and also when I placed some acoustical treatments, he has done neither. Admittedly, finding the "right spot" for speakers is a royal PITA, it needs to be done. He has done little to treat the room and in fact, I asked him to move the pillows that had been propped up on the backrest of his sofa because I had the same sensation I get when other phase issues are present, from bad speaker placement, crossover problems, driver polarity reversal or having a lot of absorption on one side and less on the other (which is what he had, with the pillows in place). It helped, but it didn't help enough, IMO. I also moved one speaker so its distance was more similar to the other and toed it in a bit.
I think he's having serious doubts about the system and he said he's going to return the preamp that's in the rack now- he seems to be hunting for just the right pieces more than usual and this is the reason I don't want to deal with the really high end equipment- it's easy to become veruy neurotic about whether the sound is as good as it should and could be and the price is too high for me. If price is no object, someone can spend what they want, but I don't see it as a good value to drop close to $100K and have doubts. I went to a high end dealer a couple of weeks ago and that system sounded much better, to me- the SPL was also very low and it still imaged extremely well.
Specific to Kimber cable, I know a Kimber Cable dealer and when I asked one of the guys working there about it, he told me that he asked Ray himself why he sells cables that are so expensive and the answer was "People pay me a lot of money for them".
The son of Noel Lee (fonder of Monster Cables) was asked for his opinion on his father's products and he said "My father found the solution to a problem that didn't exist".
Buy them if you want, but if you think you hear a difference, it's either because you know they're being used and were told what you should hear, you decide that you want to hear the same differences as others or because the cable has some electrical characteristic that causes this difference. A group of wires that each have been insulated will have more capacitance than a group of strands that are insulated together, like regular speaker cables. If they start talking about 'skin effect', make sure you read about this before you go to the dealer, so you have the info you'll need to see that this is a selling tactic- skin effect means nothing at audio frequencies.
Save your money.
