I always get a chuckle when reading about the sales job people get when buying audio equipment. I think that I get the most enjoyment out of the stories that involve digital audio equipment sounding much better after it has a few weeks to break in. I have read that with very high quality digital cables you need to use them on and off for a few weeks and allow them to adjust to your home climate. Every home has magnetic fields and it takes a while for the high quality digital cables to adjust to these magnetic fields.

There are at least two ways to look at cabling argument, the first is technical. Look at the digital cable that connects your transport (in my case a PC) to your surround processor (G68 in my case). If while watching a movie with DTS the signal stays locked and everything sounds fine then you are getting all the bits correctly to your sound processor. The bits that make up a DTS stream are compressed, and if they are not received correctly they will be decoded into something sounding very different than intended. There are plenty of other good technical arguments for having a digital cable good enough to get all of the bits to get to the other side, any better and the sound does not change.

Another argument is psychological. You have to look at the incentives for the sales person giving the advice. Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson could not understand why its new machine was selling so poorly in relation to its older and inferior machine. He found out that the commission arrangement with the salesman gave a large and perverse incentive to push the inferior machine on customers. You would be amazed at the subconscious motivational effects that high profit margin cabling can have.

Meridian on the other hand does not have the same incentives with regard to cabling, they supply cabling that gets the bits reliably from one component to the other. They use the same cable for all of their product reviews and trade shows. You will notice that the vast majority of dealers selling Meridian products will demonstrate Meridian products with stock cables. It is interesting that they are not so eager to get all of the benefits of more expensive cabling when they are paying the difference.