It was asserted in this thread that silver-plating will cause the high frequencies to travel faster than the lows, and thus smear out the signal when it arrives at its destination. Like a lot of things, this sounds good at first inspection, but let's see . . .
You're really talking about something called group delay here. I haven't looked up the propagation velocities for cable, but let's make some really, really outlandish assumptions and see how it works. We'll have the 20kHz signals travel at lightspeed (can't get much faster than that!), and the 20Hz signals at just 10% of that speed. For a 10 meter cable (again, several times beyond ordinary), it'll take the 20kHz signal about 33 nanoseconds to make the trip; in this exagerated example, the 20 Hz signal takes about 330 nanoseconds. Now, a 20 kHz signal has a period of 50 microseconds, so the 300 nanoseconds late arrival of the low frequency signal corresponds to less than a 2.5 degree phase shift in the 20 kHz signal! This is virtually guaranteed to be inaudible.
Going to real-world numbers reduces the phase shift to maybe 0.1 degree. Unless your amplifier is in one county and your speakers in the next, group delay in cables is not an issue. Love silver-plated cables or hate'em, phase/group delay is not the cause.
You're really talking about something called group delay here. I haven't looked up the propagation velocities for cable, but let's make some really, really outlandish assumptions and see how it works. We'll have the 20kHz signals travel at lightspeed (can't get much faster than that!), and the 20Hz signals at just 10% of that speed. For a 10 meter cable (again, several times beyond ordinary), it'll take the 20kHz signal about 33 nanoseconds to make the trip; in this exagerated example, the 20 Hz signal takes about 330 nanoseconds. Now, a 20 kHz signal has a period of 50 microseconds, so the 300 nanoseconds late arrival of the low frequency signal corresponds to less than a 2.5 degree phase shift in the 20 kHz signal! This is virtually guaranteed to be inaudible.
Going to real-world numbers reduces the phase shift to maybe 0.1 degree. Unless your amplifier is in one county and your speakers in the next, group delay in cables is not an issue. Love silver-plated cables or hate'em, phase/group delay is not the cause.