Need speaker cable

Canare seems to be a bit like Home Depot wire repackaged as speaker cables if I am not mistaken.  In some way, the same goes for Blue Jean cables.

@andy2 ,

Sorry, you are mistaken.  Canare is a Japanese made cable that almost every recording studio in the world uses to connect to the studio monitors.  Blue Jean uses the Canare cables with a pretty sheath over them to dress them up and they cold weld their terminations.  I bought mine from Ram Labs for half the price of the Blue Jeans that uses pure copper ferrules  crimped on (sounds better so they say) to high quality locking Banana Plugs. 

I used to have Blue Jeans cable and interconnects and for the price I was generally satisfied.  I then I bought some fairly basic QED cables for not that much more than what I paid for Blue Jeans, and there was a marked improvement in transparency and bass response.

I think for affordable mid-fi, Canare or Blue Jean may be OK, but for proper hi-fi, I think you probably have to look for something else better.  OP specifies a budget of $500, so I guess his system probably closer to hi-fi than mid-fi.

I'll give you the benefit of my journey over the last 12 months.  
Note that I am using low power SET power amps and high efficiency horn speakers.  Here was my journey:
- Bluejeans Cable 
- Wireworld Mini Eclipse 8
- Wireworld Equinox 8
- Audioquest Rocket 44
- Cardas Clear Cygnus
- Audience Ohno III
- Nordost Red Dawn
- Blackcat Coppertone
- Blackcat 3232
- Grover Cable SX
- Tempo Electric Pure Silver

So here are my thoughts.  (1) at the <$600 price level there isn't much difference in sound between the different companies / technologies / materials... with a couple exceptions.  (2) at <$1000 there are definite differences that are easy to tell.  (3) The cables that worked best in my system and were head and shoulders above the others were in order:
1) Grover Cable SX
2) Audience Ohno III
3) Tempo Electric Pure Silver

I ended up keeping both the Grover SX and Tempo Pure Silvers.  Hope this helps in some way. 

There’s a pair of Acoustic Zen Hologram II speaker cables in classifieds now. Within your price range. These should work great and you can continue growing your system around these cables.