Cable Controversy

IMO, there are numerous things to say about cables in general.  First, absolutely no one, perhaps outside The Cable Company, has heard even a fraction of what must surely be hundreds, if not thousands, of brands and designs.  I would include from this observation that there is no "expert" when it comes to having vast knowledge of cables.  Just be prepared to get as many answers as responders when you post questions on online forums as to which cables are best.  Second, the single biggest reason for all of the cables is that they are of relatively standard designs and require little capital investment.  Recently, at a medical device show I wandered over to a medical cable manufacturer's booth during one of many slow periods, and they told me they private label manufacture cables for numerous audio companies.  Third, everyone changes the basic designs to some degree to have a marketing edge.  Fourth, I am confident that price markups on cables are among the highest among products in the audio industry.  Fifth, in my experience I am absolutely terrific at buying cables at a good deal and pathetically poor at selling them without taking a big financial bath.  So that indicates the used cables market is a buyers' market.  Sixth, yes, cables can make a significant difference and finding the best is probably a lifetime project.

Most discrepancies in results or abberations in SQ can be easily explained by wire directionality.

Purist Audio Design, once you hear them, all of the others sound broken.

I have tried many different brands of high end cables in my system. As far as speaker cables I ended up making some home made ones out of 8 gauge mil-spec Silver plated copper wire with good terminals. Out of many different brands I have tried these sound the best by far.

rvito, I am using a 12 gauge silver plated copper wire, although not "home made". Question for you, are you using a high number of strands (i.e. somewhere in the low hundreds each of which are extremely small gauge and when combined the effective gauge is 8, or very few larger gauge)?