I imagine you will be always stuck in middle fidelity because of your closed mind and/or substandard hearing. You tell me that the "placebo effect" is responsible any improvement I perceived when I replaced my interconnects and speaker cable with high end cables that I bought for bargain. How in the **** do you know? You are making assumption with incomplete facts. My former cables consisted of moderately priced cable that can be purchased at Radio Shack but definitely good enough for middle fidelity. BTW what is the makeup of your rig? ****?