The Indras show up in the used market for about $1600 - $2000. The Sakras for several hundred more. Many of those available are about 10 to 14 years old, but to my ears the old ones don't degrade at all.
Cables depreciate like crazy, so if you know a particular cable you want, you can get a real bargain, especially with old ones.
I even tried some more expensive interconnect cables like the Nordost Valhalla and didn't like them at all, just too fatiguing.
If you buy a used high-priced cable at a good price, you can usually sell it pretty quick for what you paid for it (or even more sometimes).
Cable discussions for interconnects and power cords are relatively rare on headfi and other headphone sites, but on sites like Audiogon and Audio Asylum, cables have been discussed intensely for as long as these sites have been around (about 20 years).
If you have a Chord Dave, a couple of thousand on a cable that you can keep for life and never wears out is a cost that can be put in perspective. Many here have several headphones that each cost about this. So instead of one more headphone, try a really good cable that can improve all the others.
That's how I look at it.
And these cables are not the flavor of the month, they have been around and have been popular for almost 15 years now. But like I said, the old used ones are fine. You don't need the new shiny versions (the V10 currently for the Indras). The old ones are classics. If you find a used Sakra, that's even better. But these both sound really special.
Here's short excerpt from a 2004 6moons review of the Indra, of course for what it's worth and YMMV, but all I can say is that in lots of back-and-forth testing with other well known cables, the Stealths just did some things none of the others could, especially in the liquidity of the highs and the clarity of the bass. (To my ears, it's mainly a tonality and texture thing that the Stealths do right, rather than the soundstage thing mentioned here, but I do get that tension-easing thing he talks about.)
From 6moons back in May, 2004...
Inserting one lone 1m pair between my Zanden DAC and Orthospectrum buffer, the Indra differences were neither subtle, tonal balance-oriented or merely different-but-so-bloody-what. In one fell swoop, the Indra changed the entire
gestalt of the presentation in such a way as to be patently audible even to my wife in the upstairs area. Forget bass, midrange, treble. The instant change was two-fold. For one, three-dimensional space exploded, particularly in the depth domain. With the Gallo Reference III space meisters sans pareil, this was so obvious as to be silly:
Huge space, cubits of air. Far more importantly though, insertion of the cable also removed electronic tension and effort. When you make a fist and press hard, the musculature constricts. Though your hand doesn't look edgier, it feels that way even to an onlooker. I'm using the word 'edgy' not in the tonal domain of treble forwardness. I'm not using it in the domain of image outlines either. I'm using it to describe a very tangible feel in which the music now propagated unfettered, through the air and into the listening room. It no longer felt as though being pressed through electronic piping in little bits and pieces of data.
[ link:
http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/stealth/indra.html ]
This is a page from the Stealth site with beta testers impressions, again FWIW.
http://www.stealthaudiocables.com/products/indra/beta.htm
