I decided to react to the cable subject with my opinion, because i want you to do the right thing - do not buy the snake oil!
The below sentences were not written in a scientific research manner, but in a simple and easily comprehensible way, so that the majority of the readers could understand it. For those who prefer to get deep into this subject and verify my statements by measurements and computations, please do so. I believe that the correct interpretation of your research results will support my thesis.
This is a must read for all the audio enthusiasts, as well as audio beginners, because too much nonsense has been written on this subject and frankly, most of it comes from the high-end cable manufacturers. Why? Because the profit margin is counted in hundreds, or thousands of percents. High-end cable manufacturing company with aggressively set marketing is a gold mine, as far as it keeps persuading people not to question and not to think critically.
People who invest tens, or hundreds of thousands of dollars into their audio systems, are likely to spend a considerable amount of money on cables as well. That is perfectly fine, if they just want to have an expensive stuff from the A to Z, or lets apply it to this subject, from the transformer station that is feeding the whole house, to the voice coils of the loudspeaker drivers. If you belong to this group of people and you have invested a considerable amount of money into the cables for whatever reason except a sound improvement, I can understand and support such logic. But if you bought it because you wanted to hear "more", you were deceived and you just poured your capital into someone else's bank account. If you are fine with that, let me know and i will send you my bank account as well : )
I would like to clarify some important things though. All my arguments are focused on high-end cables in comparison with ordinary cheap cables with similar length and similar conductor diameters. Please notice, that i am not even writing "the same", but i used the word "similar". Yes, I am that confident. So, you are asking now: "are you saying that a cheap 20 Euro copper speaker cable sounds the same as a 10k copper cable?" YES, that is exactly what i am saying!
A few, i would say, solid arguments:
As far as i know, there is no valid scientifically proven test(and there will never be any), that would support the cable myth about the difference in sound, between cheap and high-end cables. This means, that nobody was able to pass such test, although a large number of people would swear, that there is an audible difference. Personally, i know a lot of them and none of them had passed a similar test either. Now, are they making fools out of themselves? Well, some yes. But some of them may be innocent, because they were influenced. Be it a sales person, a hifi community, or a manufacturer's website, they will likely trust what they hear or read, especially if it looks all so convincing. The briefly described cable technologies that they never heard of before, looks appealing and trustworthy. Why they would question a well established manufacturer with years of experience and thousands of positive reviews. Why they would question the sales person who, speaking about the cables, was so convinced himself that if the customer would show a little doubt, he would look and feel like a fool. Why would they question their friends, who can "easily and clearly hear it". What i have observed in general, people like to believe. No questions, no hassle. Unfortunately, at the end, just wasted money.
Technologies and phenomenons that high-end cable manufacturers are presenting oftentimes exist and work, but they are not applicable to the low voltage, low frequency audio industry. Thus, those fancy sounding technologies you are paying for, are totally useless. The first one that comes to my mind is a technology that "successfuly battles" the skin effect. Every company that promotes the skin effect as being harmful for the hi-fi reproduction is simply misleading you. What they do not tell you is the fact, that the skin effect is observable in the megahertz frequency band, well above the capability of the human hearing and transmitted analog audio signal. The same applies for the technology that suppose to eliminate the eddy currents in a wire. Not only being extremely low to a negligible level, compared to the carrying signal, but we are again dealing with the radio frequency band here. I could continue with other technologies, but i do not want to waste too much time on this one. Whatever technology you find and read about, please ask questions, do a research and learn. Ask yourself, whether is the technology applicable to a low frequency band, whether the treatment, focused on a conductor, or a dielectric, is strong enough to influence the carrying analog audio signal, whether any mechanical vibration of the environment could alter the signal, whether electrostatic buildup, polarized dielectric, directionality, cryo treatment, dielectric bias system, cable geometry and many many others, could change the original signal to that extent, so you could hear it. I will save your time, none of those can be detected by human hearing. If you do not believe me, please do your own research.
Measurable parameters of a wire/cable - conductor material, cross-sectional area, resistance, capacitance, inductance. Some time ago, these basic parameters were widly discussed about. I am not saying it disappeard now, but some of the manufacturers stopped publishing it. Instead, they moved to a little more sophisticated marketing jargon. However, there are still people, who give a great importance to these parameters. All i can do is to tell you, that all of them are negligible for our purpose. At the same time I have to also add, that i am not taking into consideration the extremes, regarding the conductor material and its diameter. As i have already stated, both parameters of the cheap and high-end cables should be similar in comparison. Based on these similarities, i can assure you, that other electrical parameters, resistance, capacitance and inductance, will have no effect on your sound perception.
Conductor material - whether you use a regular copper, red copper, oxygen free copper, silver plated copper, pure silver, or any other commonly used cable material, the electrical and thermal differences between them are absolutely unimportant for the low frequency audio band. There are people though, who claim that silver cables sound more trebbly.. If they would be right, the silver cable would have to act as a high pass filter (within the low frequency band <100kHz). However, compared to the copper, it does not, thus they are wrong.
Cross-sectional area - for some, perhaps the most important parameter. Well, not really. If we are not speaking about extremes, you cannot hear the difference between 2mm² and 6mm². Someone might be arguing about the power handling and the resistance, or conductivity of the cable. Hey, we are staying within the living room environment, using just a few meters of the cable, not hundreds!
Resistance - chasing the lowest possible resistance of a cable. Good luck. Do you really think that you can hear the difference of a few miliohms between an ordinary copper and 7N OFC, OCC, pure silver, or OXPC? Ok, the last one i made up, but i could not help myself, i apologize : ). The truth is, you have no chance of hearing such difference. You would have to measure it with a decent laboratory equipment to find out, how small it is. Regarding the interconnect's cable resistance, look at the input and output impedance of the electronic devices and you will see, that the cable value is extremely low for us to detect such difference. For the home audio listening experience, this parameter is absolutely unimportant. I am not finished with this one, i will come back to this later.
Capacitance - another parameter that is widely abused by marketers and manufacturers. I remember reading in audio magazines about these basic parameters, where higher capacitance cables were sounding worse than those with lower capacitance. The differences were again negligible, but people somehow adopted this nonsense and spreaded this like a virus. We are talking about picofarad units. I will use an example based on my own observations. As a person who was making, tweaking and fine tuning loudspeaker crossovers, i can honestly say, that the differences in picofarad levels are again, absolutely inaudible. A loudspeaker crossover has capacitors in the micro farad region. A "micro", is million times greater than "pico". An example: you have a 4 - 8 ohm tweeter with a 10 microfarad capacitor connected in series. If you add to this capacitor another one with value of 50 nanofarads (connected in parallel to the 10µF), it will sum up to 10,05 microfarads. I guarantee you that you will not be able to recognize it, while listening to the music. And those 50 nanofarads are still thousand times greater than 50 picofarads, where would most likely be the cable differences. Now, someone might be arguing that a cable capacitance is not in series capacitance and thus it does not act like a high pass filter, but the opposite. For the example purpose, i decided to use the series capacitance on a tweeter, because it affects the frequencies where the human ear is the most sensitive (2kHz - 4kHz, depending on the tweeter impedance). Even if you apply it as a parallel capacitance, the result is practically the same - no change to your ears. If you do not trust me, please buy a tweeter, the capacitors and try it yourself.
Inductance - another cable parameter that is again, in home audio system, irrelevant. For the home audio lengths, the speaker cable inductance is measured in single units of microhenry, so when you want to compare two cables, the differences between a cheap cable and high end cable are so low, that you should consider this point closed. Furthermore, it mostly affects frequencies in the region of hundreds of kHz, if we stay within a standard living room cable lengths and standard speaker impedances (4 - 8 ohms). You can also do a simple experiment, similar to the one with the capacitance. Because the crossover inductors in your loudspeakers are thousand times greater (measured in millihenries), adding or removing few microhenries will do no audible effect to your ears. The interconnect's cable inductance, is even less important. If you consider the inductance in terms of a low pass filter that is dependent on the load, look at the input impedance of the electronic device and you will see, that the high frequency roll-off would occur in the GHz region.
A hollistic approach - the final one. I think everybody will agree about the saying that a chain is only as strong, as it is its weakest link. If you apply this to your audio chain, you should realize that all the mentioned cable parameters are unimportant. You may have noticed, that by now, i was referring to the speaker cables and interconnects only. Now it is time, to also mention the power cables. Yes, they fall within the same nonesense high-end category, and i wanted to apply the hollistic view for particularly this type of cables. Some of them get pretty thick and heavy, so according to some believers of heavy weight power cables, it is needed for the lowest loss, the cleanest sound and the best dynamics. Unfortunately, this is a total bullshit. Those believers unintentionally lie to themselves and this is why i am using the hollistic approach. Everytime you will get confronted by such believers, ask them these few questions:
Have you ever wondered what is going on after the high-end power cable connects to the amplifier, or whatever equipment it goes into? If not, then you should. If it is not permanently attached to the chassis, it goes to a mains connector. In the best case scenario, the connector's contacts are made of copper, probably plated by gold, or rhodium, or whatever else to protect it from the oxidation process. From the connector, it is going to a mains switch or a relay. In any case, the AC goes to the terminal contacts and to the switching contacts, and then it continues to the transformer(s) or other components/circuits. This road is made by wires, PCB copper traces, or a combination of both, maybe some FASTON connectors and a solder. The last one being the the worst conductor of them all. If you are a healthy judgement person, you clearly see, that the high-end power cable is way oversized compared to the internal road, not to mention, that there is probably a fuse in between. Now, think about the bottleneck here, the weakest link from this part of chain. Is it the fuse, or the internal wires, or the printed circuit board copper traces, or the contacts, or the solder? What is the logic behind using the high purity heavy gauge power cable, if the voltage and the current has these "inferior" elements in the path? Well, there is no logic here and for our purpose, they are not audibly inferior.
Another point of concern is the analog RCA, or XLR interconnect cable. Here, unlike in the previous case, the cable carries a low level analog audio signal that connects two equipment. As an example, we will use a signal source, such as a CD player, or a network streamer which is connected to an integrated amplifier. The signal path looks like this: after the D/A conversion, the analog audio signal goes through several different types of passive and active electronic components, connected together by copper traces on a PCB. Each component has to be soldered onto the copper traces creating a functional circuit network that is finally ended by the output connectors. From the output connectors, it continues to the cable connectors, where it is soldered or mechanically secured and then, using its conductors, travels to the other side, where it is again terminated by the connectors. From here, it is going to the input connectors of the integrated amplifier, passing the numerous components and solder joints for further signal processing and amplification. Now, if you look at the whole signal path, not just the interconnect cable itself, you have to admit, that having an expensive high-end interconnect cable does not help you at all. Instead, look for brand names used in studios, their price/performance ratio cannot be beaten.
We can apply a similar strategy with the speaker cables. After the signal is leaving the final power amplifier stage where it is going through multiple components and solder joints, it ultimately goes to the output terminals of the amplifier. There you connect the speaker cable on one side, and the loudspeaker on the other one. Now, look at it from the wider angle, where is the bottleneck. Is it inside the amplifier, where the signal has to pass the last active component - the power transistor with its physical and electrical limitations, compared to the loudspeaker cable, or is it the solder joints that makes the connection to the copper traces of the PCB, or is it the output connector of the amplifier? Is it on the loudspeaker's side? The input connectors? The wiring inside the loudspeaker? The crossover and its passive components, resistors, capacitors and inductors? Is it the driver voice coil? You can place the most expensive speaker cable that exists in between and you get only as much, as is allowed from the worst link of this signal path. And all of those i just mentioned are worse, compared to the speaker cable. Now i can come back to the parameters of the cable. Look at the crossover components and its unit values(ohms, microfarads, millihenries). Compare it to the specification values of the cable and all should be clear. Most of the crossovers have an L-pad (voltage divider) to adjust the signal level among the drivers to match the sensitivity. There you already have two resistors rated in ohm units, which are made from an alloy material inferior to the copper, but you are concerned about the loudspeaker cable's purity and resistance, rated in thousand times smaller units - milliohms. Not to mention the remaining capacitors and inductors in the signal path. Lastly, there is the driver's voice coil that you should look at, because in some cases, it could be made from aluminum, copper clad aluminum or copper. You have so many things to consider while thinking about the weakest link, that a high-end loudspeaker cable is the last one, you should be concerned about.
My last words
Now i am seriously asking you, are you sure you can hear a difference between the cables?
If you are not sure, there is a hope for you, because you are thinking critically and you question yourself. I am happy and i can congratulate you for being honest to yourself. You are a person who does not have a problem to admit for being influenced, or mistaken. It takes a great courage to do so, especially for those who were high end cable believers before.
If you say "YES", then i am very sorry for you. If all these arguments mean nothing to you, there is probably little help and hope for you. You basically lie to yourself and you are not able to open your mind to the possibility of being wrong. This is the sad part of your self-centered personality. You are probably mad at my judgements towards you and you question my credibility and my personality. I am not surprised at all, but i am confident in my opinion because of the most simple fact - nobody had passed a simple blind test and repeated it.