At one point, an attendee approached me in the hallway and said, "Is it just me, or are a lot of these rooms bright?"

There's more than one way to skin a cat—a profusion of ways to hook together audio components in the high-end world of today—and my hunch is that the number of dedicated cabling companies has increased within the past decade, and now exceeds that of any other audio-hardware category.

Back in 1970, one Julian Vereker decided to record some musician friends in his house in Salisbury, England. Using standard, off-the-shelf electronics and tape machines, he was startled at how dissimilar the recording was to the sound of live instruments. As a result, he started designing his own recording electronics, including a recording console, of which he sold several to local broadcast facilities.