Speaker cables.. Budget again.. With a twist...

Buconero17 and Bdgregory - very nice advice. It is refreshing to hear persons give advice that results in no waste of money on the part of the consumer. I can find no scientific reason to choose one cable over the other for the same guage wire or to choose silver, gold, titanium, uranium, lead, platinum, or any other metal over copper. Hence, buy the inexpensive copper cable. If you posed some of the questions you see on the web- i.e. should one pick the $25 per foot cable over the $20 per foot cable because the former "has more punch," to my former associates (spent many years as a practicing engineer working with other engineers, and yes, I mean engineers, we all had BSEE's or MSEE's, not guys with 'engineer' on their company shirt) I can picture the laughter, particularly if the explanations were included for why the expensive cables were better than the inexpensive cables. Anyway nice advice, you did a service to those who may otherwise needlessly waste money. I concur, go with the home depot stuff, good price, will work fine, and except for the placebo effect, it will sound as good as the $5000 cables. (actually to make the home depot sound even better than the $5000 cable, attach a price tag to each cable, highly visible, and write $6000 on the tag - wallah - a $6000 cable, a whole $1000 better than the $5000 cable and will really show itself when the amp is cranked all the way to eleven.

Leaving science and theory aside, the contention that auditory perception is a reasonable basis for choosing one cable of the same guage over another is also flawed. I am unaware of any studies conducted with reliable controls (i.e. double blind studies conducted by an uninterested party) that show that humans can tell the difference between such cables. The last I heard, audiophiles could not tell the difference between metal coat hangers and specialty cable. What is argued to show this difference is offered as emperical evidence, but is no more than anecdotal evidence. One can find anectodal evidence to prove anything - sightings of big foot and ufo's for example. By the way, I concur with Sinisterporpoise68 - Belden cable works great. Belden has had a consistently good reputation for decades and is an industry standard across applications. Furthermore, Blue Jean Cable has a relatively low markup. To get it for less one pretty much has to buy large fairly large rolls.

Actually, the fact that music is not a simple sinusoid really is not at all important. Fourier demonstrated long ago that a complex waveform can be completly defined by a series of sinusoids. It took a while for technology to catch up but with digitization and application of time saving techniques such as the fast fourier transform his theories are now a part of electronic systems across the spectrum (pun intended). We use these ideas to analyze everything from ecg waveforms to radar signatures to identify whether an aircraft is friend or foe. The complexity of audio waveforms are not an obstacle to complete definition. And again, I am unaware of any double blind studies showing that people can hear the difference between cables. We usually use science to verify or correct perception of the senses. How many experts bought fake works of great artists only to discover through scientific methods that what they bought were created years after the supposed creator died. But either way, science or human perception, the evidence points to the lack of difference between the specialty cables and just plain old wire. Usually the most obvious answer is the correct one.