There’s a long history in the audio-visual industry of fetishizing the little bits of gear that make the high-priced electronic components work together. If you’re going to spend a few grand on a stereo receiver, after all, you might look like an easy mark for salesmen hawking $100 Monster HDMI cable and 24 carat gold wire connectors — you might even be talked into spending $465 on a string of speaker wire with a “slender profile and jewel-like finish.” Who cares if the benefits of these hyped products are often dubious, with plenty of tech-heads providing hands-on analysis in exposés like this one. Consumer annoyance with this trend seems to have come to a boil recently, as influential blogs like Boing Boing Gadgets note that the luxury cable trend is migrating from A/V gear to mundane objects found in any computer user’s drawer. In response to Denon’s introduction of a 1.5 meter Ethernet cable costing $500 (pictured), Amazon users have taken to the barricades, using the site’s customer feedback system to post what BB describes as “perhaps the best Amazon reviews page of all time.” Scrolling through the list, Rob Beschizza found triumphs of facetiousness like a one-star review by a man who claims to “regularly spend over $1,000 on cables to get the ultimate sound” and warns readers that, if readers ignore Denon’s directions and accidentally plug the cable in the wrong direction, “your music will play backwards.” Others feign geeky ecstasy, praising the cable while wishing they could plug it into their own bodies or boasting that it moved data along with such speed the electrons left black holes in their wake. The cables also solve global warming, we’re told, and deserve “eleventy million stars.” Even for people who ignore customer reviews as a rule, the thread is well worth a read — and might even contain a few tidbits of non-sarcastic information.