I suspect most of you have seen this intro to Michael Fremer at home. Boggles the mind. Most people would look at it and say he's a hoarder. Amazing to hear him wax rhapsodic about cables and amplifiers in that awful space. Notice he issues a cable challenge?
If someone sends him some cheap $900 interconnects and they sound as good as the $18,000 interconnects that he's using, he'll gladly use the cheap $900 interconnects and send the expensive stuff back to whoever loaned them to him.
$30,000 speaker cable to connect speakers to amps that look like they're four or five feet away. At this distance you could use some old scrap telephone wiring and most likely would not be able to hear any difference. Maybe a barely perceptible amount of linear attenuation would be audible, but nothing more.
Someone is bound to have done, at some point, bench testing of different tonearms using the same cartridge. Obviously you need vinyl with test tracks. You wouldn't likely even need to do listening tests since there is essentially zero likelihood of any measurable difference.
The fresh-looking copper on his hot water tank is most likely oxygen-free copper.
"AC power cords make a big diff ... You don't think they make a big difference? Take the cheap RUBBER ones that come in your equipment, and you're cheating yourself ... you really owe it to yourself to find a way to replace all your AC power cords with really expensive ones..."
Ha. If he were a true audiophile, he would run down to Home depot and grab some single-strand 12/3 house wiring and run house wiring straight to all the gear, thus eliminating the damned inherently inferior power cords altogether. Everyone knows that single-strand 12/3 house wiring sounds way better than any of the after-market power cords. Well, some of the after-market cords that use cream-colored insulation that matches the house wiring is decent, but still not nearly as good as the real thing.
Referring to his copy of 1976 Decca vinyl issue of Porgy and Bess (Lorin Maazel, Cleveland Symphony, etc.), he passionately exclaims,
"You can get a CD, it's not gonna sound, it's not even gonna be close to this."
He does not miss an opportunity to assert that CD is patently inferior to vinyl.