"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?

I was flicking through "What HiFi" magazine and I came across something very
odd - a series of reviews on *digital* audio cables, for connecting a CD
player to an amp.

There are comments such as "this cable brings across a crisp sound a cut
above the rest"

Now, at this point I have to shake my head in disbelief. Surely a digital
cable about 1 metre long can easily carry a 1mbit data stream with no
errors. Bear in mind ethernet has to carry 100mbits.

It got even worse when they talked about optical cables. There is absolutely
*no* way an optical pulse can be distorted sufficiently over 1 metre that it
could result in an error.

I can only think that the testers suffered some sort of placebo effect, or
they are in cahoots with the industry in order to provide a supply of
customers who will shell out £350 for the "best" optical cable.

Which brings me onto CD players. I always thought that amplifier and
speakers mattered the most, but What HiFi reckons CD players are important,
and worthing spending loads of money on. Now, if you have a CD player in a
half decent Hi-Fi setup then you use a digital interconnect, so really, all
the CD player is having to do is read the raw data off the CD and feed it to
the Amp, and the cleverness of its own DAC is neither here nor there.

So in a £1,000 CD player are you paying for a great DAC (which you won't
use) or simply some very good error correction in the reading process?

I just wonder if this magazine is just designed so that the industry is able
to flog expensive kit.