A reasonable question for "exotic" cables and embellishments thereto is what kind of engineering and/or physics background does the designer who invented them have. I tried to find out what training many famous cable "engineers" have and there is no mention of it anywhere to be found. If they were trained physicists they would know how to calculate the effect of such things as electric field dipole energy introduced into and later released from the floor your cables are on. Such energy from the minuscule electric fields surrounding loudspeaker cables is so slight it could return only a tiny fraction of a micro-Volt signal to the speakers. Skin effect is another example of junk science. Cable manufacturers advertise the steps they take to address the problem of skin effect causing high frequencies to be attenuated by the loss of conductivity of electricity flowing through the center of a conductor away from the surface where skin effect concentrates the current. Some use litz construction; many thin conductors individually insulated to make them thinner than the skin depth at high frequencies. Others use ribbon cables because the thickness of a ribbon conductor is less than the skin depth. Here is the problem: you can use a graduate E&M physics text to do an integral of current density at a given voltage taking into account the diminution of skin depth and conductivity of the cable, or there are free online calculators which do the integration for you and give you the resistance of a length of any gauge cable for any frequency. My 8 gauge speaker cables have a DC resistance of 0.008 Ohms. At 20 kHz skin effect increases that resistance to 0.016 Ohms. In series with my 4 Ohm planar magnetic speakers, the ratio of resistance, and the ratio of signal current through my speakers, is 4.008 to 4.016. This means at 20 kHz, a frequency almost nobody can hear, the sound pressure is reduced by 0.017 dB, proportionally less at lower frequencies. Cable designers either did not know how to calculate this or they knew the public would have a superficial idea about skin effect and fall for it. Any physicist in today's culture where authority no longer has to be earned the way marketing does not will be dismissed for want of charisma if he/she points such things out.
For me, these selling points of cables is so extreme and so fraudulent none of their rationalizations for cables costing hundreds or thousands of dollars has any credibility. How many people who have already invested in such things can suffer the loss of bicycle tire pumps to their self-esteem to admit they can't hear the difference they paid for? That is why I trust myself to design my own amplifiers, preamplifiers, and cables more than I do most manufacturers. Like all other industries, there is more and more dishonesty.
