Well, I never had a doubt that AQ builds a very high quality cable or whatever that is carefully QC tested and will not fall apart. That was never an issue with me. And, it was the very least they could do for the exhorbitant price. The only real issue goes to vague, subliminal or even explicit claims about superior technical performance in some way and the dodgy marketing of those claims with zero objective substantiation. That was true in spite of the fact that the nature of the claims was usually specific enough to be measurable. Huge problems for me.
As to Amir's point of surprise about the company's size, I am not at all surprised. I have no doubt that Bill Low is worth many millions as a result of successfully carrying out his clever and persistent marketing of very high profit margin products by cleverly playing to gullible audiophiles and their golden ears, plus dealers and reviewers on their greedy ride along with him. I especially love the regular product obsolescence and model turnover every couple of years in cables, hardly a hotbed of new technological discovery.
He is no fool, and he has pulled off a great triumph of pure marketing of BS in what had been an undifferentiated, bulk commodity product category overturning science and common sense. Maybe they already have become one, but AQ would be an outstanding example for the case study method of successful businesses at the Wharton or Harvard Business Schools. But, even there, at least in my day at Wharton, the ethics of marketing that level of BS in an ostensibly technical field would have presented grave problems.
He is perhaps the prototype original cable bandit, and perhaps the most successful of them all. I could be wrong, but wasn't AQ the first of the cable geniuses to market solid silver wires? Wow, what a sonic breakthrough they were, but that is now a regular product concept of theirs, even for HDMI, USB and digital cables.
