I bet the FTC has some formula for prioritization of which cases to pursue. They probably count the number of complaints, whether there's a public safety issue, or other harm that customers might experience. This is just rich people wasting their money. Why do people buy certain brands of very expensive cars? Maybe a Lexus has the same ride as a Rolls Royce for a quarter the price (just guessing, just trying an analogy, have no idea), I think the Lexus looks better, but a Rolls Royce is a statement. At the very least, it looks distinctive enough that there's no doubt that its owner is stinking rich.
There are various standards in place for cables used in engineering, but these standards are set by engineers and not by audiophiles. See e.g. http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/cable/coaxperf.html#power
By the way, it is reasonable for top quality cables to be rather more expensive than what Axiom charges for speaker cables. My employer (Agilent) for example sells ordinary rugged BNC-connector cables for something like a hundred bucks per meter. Other manufactures sell semi-rigid cables for precision testing from DC to 40 GHz, charging maybe a hundred bucks per foot. (At the highest frequencies, they normally come with special connectors that require torque wrenches to get the connection just right, but below a few hundred MHz you don't need anything better than BNC.)
But such cables are sold with any claims of resistance, impedance, leakage, shielding, all independently verifiable. I simply cannot imagine how you could get better transmission of an audio signal (better meaning less noise, better controlled cable capacitance and inductance, at all frequencies) than what you'd get with a conventional ~$500 cable used for test and measurement.
If cables really mattered to audio, what you'd see is high-end manufacturers making speakers that require individual, shielded BNC connector cables for the + and -, everyone would buy 50 Ohm cables off the shelf (they only cost a couple bucks per foot and are good up to 10s of MHz) and high end receivers would have BNC connector outputs for the speakers. Since the cables would be of a known impedance, speaker design would be simplified. For the ultimate in high fidelity, "triaxial" cables could be used, since these reduce the leakage (and noise) in cables still further, and would only cost maybe twice as much as regular coax if that. Snobs could get the Agilent quality cables (they look nicer, they're supple, the connectors are top-notch) and the rest of us could get RF cables for the same cost as Monster cables. Amazing but true.
But the need clearly isn't there, thus all we're left with is marketing-driven nonsense like hi-fi cables.
