Just about any speaker cable of appropriate guage will "preserve that
signal."
The notion that your signal is lost in the speaker cable is something that was
dreamed up in a cable marketers advertising meeting.
The signal is lost in your speaker -- not the cable.
There are rather large problems in just about every speaker and most rooms.
Just about all speakers are only linear +/- anywhere from 1 to 3 db (or more)
and roll off at the extremes.
Cables are far more linear by comparison.
Listening rooms, unless they have been specifically designed for listening to
reproduced music, usually have rather large problems with rather large peaks
and valleys, introduce time smear, boomy bass, hardness in the highs, etc.
No one has ever been able to measure distortion caused by a cable, despite
what cable advertisers say.
Cable companies have done a brilliant job of getting people to focus
suspicion on their innocent cables while ignoring the rest of the chain.
I'd wager that a couple of hundred dollars spent on acoustical consulting or a
speaker upgrade would go exponentially further in fixing what is wrong or
improving the sound of 99% of the systems on Audiogon.
In most cases, money spent on expensive speaker cables -- where improved
performance is questionable and controversial at best would be better spent
elsewhere in the chain.
Regarding silver: The only thing silver has to offer is that it has less
resistance, which means all you have to do is use thicker copper cables to get
the exact same effect.
I think the fixtion on silver is a carry over from people who play musical
instruments. For example, steel strings sound different from bronze, brass
horns sound different from silver, etc.
Cables are not plucked, they do not make music by vibrating -- they just
carry signal. The signal doesn't pick up any sound from the silver or copper.
If you've been using copper and you switch to the same gauge silver cable
and you don't level match, it is possible the silver cable simply makes the
music slightly louder, and any audio salesman knows you can trick customers
into thinking one component is more detailed than another simply by playing
it a little louder. We all know that sometimes just a few ticks more volume is
enough to make the speakers open up and become fuller.
Other than that, there may be some psychological effect from thinking of
silver as shinier, whiter -- and thus more pure than copper which is, of
course, copper colored.
