Speakermaster, you actually have it right. Engineers are almost always blinded by equations. Engineers always hide behind equations when they don't understand the "unknown".
It comes down to how the molecules pack when extruded. I had a discussion with a cable manufacturer on how his cables sounded so much better than the much more expensive ones they were replacing. We had a great discussion. He said he had trouble believing it because he was a physicist and the equations did not explain this, but the directionality of the wire was an observed, repeatable characteristic.
He hired a material scientist.
The material scientist found out the packing of copper molecules when it was extruded created a definite difference in inductance. There were a couple other things like copper purity and b-field affect based on the casing.
I was trained as a physical chemist myself, and used material scientists to help me design polymer networks for coatings and other esoteric stuff like that.
Here, take a look at this:
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/introchem/chapter/crystal-structure-closest-packing/this is a simple example on how molecular packing works. The effect of packing will have a very significant impact on final properties.
Engineers work with the known. Scientists work with the unknown. I have worked in both fields. The physics equations that describe sound are not be all, end all. And frankly, they do not describe the fine details of music well. The equations are not necessarily correct.
Now if you have total faith in your equations (and won't trust your ears), think of this. Newton was the most brilliant scientist of the last 500 years. His three laws of physics were probably the greatest scientific breakthrough ever. Kepler built on Newton's work and created equations to predict the motion of the planets. They worked on all the planets--except Mercury. Why? Well, the equations did not take into account of the spacetime warpage between the sun and Mercury. You need to use Einstein's relativistic equations since the mass differences between the sun and Mercury create spacetime warpage significant enough that Newton's equations (thereby Kepler's) do not account for, therefore will not describe the observations.
This is a great example where the accepted equations worked in many situations--but not all. Do not be blinded by science. It is not perfect!
It is a common fallacy that engineers fall into. They think if the observations conflict with the equations, the observations must be wrong. I suppose it is because the equations can work so well for so many things, and engineers spend so much time doing the known, that they can have trouble with the unknown.
Minorl934's list (among others, I am singling this post out because it was the last post to give a definitive list from physics) does not talk about molecular packing variants in his equation list. This is what happens when your are "blinded by science" and assume that what you know is all there is.
There are many other aspects of materials science that can affect sound quality of wires that are not handled by the classic physics equations.
