[...]
On other topics you raise, as someone who doesn’t subscribe to the whole expensive cable thing, I nevertheless find it interesting to discover that magazines lie about such things for commercial reasons. They don’t - high-end cable manufacturers are seldom good advertising partners and those reviewers who do enthuse about cables and mains conditioners do so from the position of a believer. I am confident this is entirely free from being advertising-led (although not free from the influence of others), as many of the most fervent subscribers to such things do not seem to live in the real world of advertisers and marketing strategies. This is also why most of us who have no interest in expensive wire choose to live and let live – it’s taking on a belief system rather than a mere concept.
Also, the audiophile who refuses to have a TV set will not be swayed by the size or flatness of the screen. They reject television as an entertainment medium altogether. These are – I freely admit – the more febrile members of the audiophile community, but if you are dealing with a fraternity so backwards-looking that they reject TV, little wonder that the initial reaction to multichannel music was ‘I didn’t like Quadraphonic in the 1970s, I won’t like it now’.
Finally, as to restrictive practices and the OFT, it has happened before. It will happen again.
