excerpt from Ethan Winer's website:THE CABLE GUY The earliest audio scam I can recall is fancy wire for connecting loudspeakers, and it's still going strong. These days vendors claim their wire yields better sound quality when compared to normal wire, and, of course, it's much more expensive than normal wire. In truth, the most important property of speaker wire is resistance, which is a function of its thickness. The resistance must be low to pass the high-current signals a power amplifier delivers, and is exactly analogous to a large water pipe allowing more flow than a small pipe. For short distances - say, up to five feet - 16 gauge wire of any type is adequate, though thicker wire is needed for longer runs. The three other wire parameters are inductance, capacitance, and skin effect. But those are not a factor with usual cable lengths at audio frequencies, especially when connecting speakers to a power amplifier. Low capacitance wire can be important in special cases, like between a phonograph cartridge and its preamp. But high quality, low capacitance wire can be had for pennies per foot. Wire scams are very popular because wire is a low-tech device that's simple to…

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