Typical "audiophile".  I'm not saying everything the audiophile's subscribe to is bunk, but a lot of it is.

am I the one that's crazy?

Only if you buy one!
 

 
T

1. Some people will believe any sort of nonsense that marketing people tell them (often corroborated by accompanying magazine/web articles). They are not technically minded enough to be able to tell the difference between techno-speak nonsense and physics, so they tend to believe stuff if it can be made to sound plausible to them.
 
2. Because for some reason they have a strong emotional desire to believe in such things, they will automatically reject any educated arguments explaining why whatever it is couldn't make a difference, the supposed differences can't be measured (or when measured are far below the threshold of being audible) and the fact that differences are only "heard" during sighted testing.
 
 
Surprisingly many people here, who you would think should know better, behave exactly the same way when confronted with something that sounds plausible to them but they don't fully understand. You can tell them why it's fairly easy to prove that it's bogus marketing, but it doesn't even move their needle to introduce even a tiny bit of doubt in their minds. 

Heh,
 
Anybody that tells you they can hear 'jitter' on a USB is clearly full of it - USB doesn't use a synchronous protocol, for that matter, neither does Firewire... isochronous may be time coherent, but it isn't phase coherent...
 
'Squarer' waves... what a load...

I'll sell you my USB cable for just $699.

If you told "audiophiles" that their hi-fi would sound better if they listened to it while standing on their head in a plastic bucket of cold cat sick 23% of them would believe you.
 
If you then told them that for the "true audiophile experience" the bucket had to be gold-lined, silver plated and "electrostatically hyper-charged" by an AAA battery connected by "rare earth metal" cable to concentrate the woo, and that the whole assembly could be theirs for a "mere" $2,499.99 the number of believers would triple and you'd get rave reviews in the audiophile comics.
 
Some people are immune to logic, fact or common sense.

Blind A/B testing is like cage-night at the WWF - everybody's gonna get the snot knocked outta them and us viewers all get entertained.

I should sell cables instead of going to work every day. What a waste.
 
There is a difference between poor quality and good quality - especially at high frequencies. Try a bad, long HDMI cable, and you will see the error rate as flickering pixels.
Even a 1.5 m USB cable for $100 would be complete nonsense.
 
Wilko 

The latest "in thing" in Nashville is the Little Walter amps.  $2500 for a 50 watt head.  From what I gather on other forums its not much more than the generic amplifier circuit in the RCA tube manual.  But he uses $20 (each) "audiophile" capacitors.

It's all relative. We mock those with more money than sense for buying $300 power cables, but spend some time in a truly impoverished country and you'll start to think about your own purchases that may strike others as laughable excess. Think disposable diapers, non-recyclable containers, off-road vehicles that never leave pavement, doggie hairdressers, 80" flatscreen TVs, garage-door and gate openers, $3 bottles of water, hand-clap sample libraries.

This is some funny stuff.....
 

drewfx1
1. Some people will believe any sort of nonsense that marketing people tell them (often corroborated by accompanying magazine/web articles).  

The magazine with the story hyping the cables also tends to have several full page 4 color ads for those cables immediately before the so-called "unbiased story".......
 
and....
 

bitflipper
It's all relative. We mock those with more money than sense for buying $300 power cables, but spend some time in a truly impoverished country and you'll start to think about your own purchases that may strike others as laughable excess. Think disposable diapers, non-recyclable containers, off-road vehicles that never leave pavement, doggie hairdressers, 80" flatscreen TVs, garage-door and gate openers, $3 bottles of water, hand-clap sample libraries.

 
 
Dave nails it again..... loved the last one..... hand clap sample libraries.....

Using DAW technology we are used to understanding the nature of digital signal transfer and the points of isolation between the digital world and the analog world. But the less technical might be easily convinced of sneak paths for signal-degrading electrical disruptions that can travel along or be induced within even a USB cable. The disruptions can crawl through the listener's equipment into their ears by every means imaginable. Someone here posted this a while back. Fun to read; fun to imagine what people can believe.