Speaker Cables? why all the hype for expensive speaker wire?

"Expectation bias, if you expect to hear something you will."

Oh gee patrickorlando! Did you make that up all by yourself?
It's been said many times, and it sounds good, but it's not usually true for several reasons, the most important being that cables do sound different, and some better (to a given listener in his system) than others.

This cables all sound the same BS comes up so regularly you can set your clock by it. 

I think better speaker cables matter. Maybe not as much as your power cables do.

I just bought Townshend F-1 Fractal speaker cables. Should get here in 2 weeks. Big upgrade from my Straight Wire Crescendo’s.

I was thinking about upgrading my speaker cables for awhile but couldn't pull the trigger as I could differentiate them. But the Fractals are a different ballgame.

DIY cables!  Let's twist again, like we did last summer.....*ouch*g*

'Expectation bias'....well, no more than listening to different wired by different playing into different....

To NOT expect a 'difference' and Not be 'rewarded'.....

...what's left of a mind boggles....;)

Someone hit the nail right on the head a few answers in. If noise is gonna enter any system, it will be on the input side of your system. As a club DJ Audio Video engineer of some 40 years now, I often laugh at the specs quoted by companies. I use high quality RCA cables to connect components to my amplifier which is a Primaluna Dialogue HP Integrated Valve driven amplifier. For the Phone stage I use a Cambridge MM pre-amplifier and my turntable is a brand new Technics SL1200 MK2 fitted with an Ortofon cartridge. To put things in perspective, I turn everything on and with everything at idle, I turn up the amplifier flat out. All I hear is a tiny bit of hiss. Naturally I'm hardly gonna play some vinyl at that level. I can't get much past the 10.o.clock position before it becomes painfully loud. I use 4 gauge high quality speaker cable on all the systems I own and any noise that occurs is never on the output side. If you wanna spend 30 K on speaker cable, it's your wallet, not mine. My CD player is a Pioneer CDJ and sounds wonderful using  its on board DAC. Just remember that the shorter any cable you use the better. Cheers.