I think that another factor may be something I recently learned about called "the Ikea effect": the idea that a part of the attraction that people have for Ikea furniture, above and beyond the low cost, is that because they're required to assemble it themselves, the owners feel that they've put something of themselves into the furniture.

I can see something like this being a part of the audiophile attraction to these types of components: that every time the owner adds a new set of magic interconnect cables, magic power cables, or whatever, they imaging that they hear an improvement. In the end, they have a lot of themselves invested in their "rig", as they call them, and so find it easy to hear virtues that aren't really there.

Agreed. And not just any cables, but polarized cables, with gold plated connectors, and the copper wire formed in oxygen-deprived environments, with individual strands following certain twist-pattern to optimize the electron flow, etc. To read the descriptions, one would think the ore were mined by elves on the moon! Nonsense, all.

I'm hoping these blokes never crack open the amp to look at the plain old PVC-insulated wiring within. And don't tell them the oil-in-paper caps are fading over time. Ditto with the carbon resistors.

Meanwhile, humidity of the air and barometric pressure has a measurable affect on the sound of paper-cone speakers. How long before an "audiophile" barometric chamber is marketed?

This discussion always makes me link to [1] the fact that audiophiles can't tell the difference between a high-end cable and a coat hanger. It's amazing what our ears want to hear vs. what they actually do.

The weakest link always has an effect, as you mention. To some musicians, this is the effect. I.E. Hendrix preferring cheap coily-cables which rolled off the high-end on his Strat/Marshall combination nicely. Now coil cables are a premium.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=audiophile+coat+hanger+test&...

This is news? Hundreds of Euro's is the LOW END of boutique cable. While there is much nonsense in the audiophile world, I'm also not going to connect my $100,000 speakers with an ugly $5 cable. If you're already in that realm, $1000 cables don't mean shit in the balance sheet.