Rolling up replies to be brief. Me brief?
YES, everyone is under the placebo effect. All the time, for all subjects. Isn't our brain a wonderous thing? We are never objective. Not humans at least. Understanding this will go a long way in life.
Bad cables may well be more obvious on great gear, but $30,000 speakers are still 1000 times worse than the the worst cables or the best electronics.
Mono-crystal OFC copper for interconnects is marketing BS. That's all. You can measure the difference in conductivity in the lab. Who freaking cares if one cable has 1m Ohm and another 1.02 when you are driving a 40K Ohm load. Speakers? OK even dipping to 3 Ohms, don't care. Perspective folks. Capacitance, inductance, and velocity matter and that comes from geometry. Well understood.
Sure I wish Belden 1500 had PTFE insulation, but in a 2 or 3 foot cable, irrelevant
As far as that silver, now at audio frequencies skin depth is about an 18 gauge wire, so full depth. Why do you want two different conductors? Marketing! Look inside that speaker and see what your boutique cable is actually driving in the loop. Unless you are in the Sabrina range, it is going into maybe 100 feet of 18 gauge cheap Chinese recycled wire. Even then, the VC is nothing special at any price. Caps? Aluminum foil. Oh yea, how about that steel wire resistor pad on the tweeter? Where do I wish we used silver? CONNECTORS. Silver oxide has the same conductivity as silver. Remember all those ugly brown tarnished type N 50 Ohm connectors? Best ever made.
Beef? Yea, I have seen big box salesmen selling $300 speaker wire to ladies buying $300 speakers. Utterly immoral in my book.
If your old Ethernet cable gave you dropouts, pixel flashes, jitter etc, it was a BAD cable. So replacing it with a cable that meets spec, i.e. CAT5e, certified, and the picture is now great just proves my point. Defective cables are bad. Good cables are good. Simple dividing line in the digital world. Analog world is touchier.
.Speaking picture quality, I have cut open a lot of HDMI cables. Cheap ones. I was having issues with POD and CEC. Several were not even constructed correctly. Drains not attached, foil backwards. Lots of problems. Replaced with Monoprice and Blue Jean. No more problems. HDMI cables are not easy to make or terminate so cheap ones tend to be, well cheap. We are still talking digital here, so any perception of resolution is placebo, not real provided you are using the correct spec cable and it does actually meet spec. An exotic Ethernet or HDMI cable can't make a sharper picture than one than only meets spec. Just the way it works. Not magic. Now, a really bad or sub-par cable may cause your Ethernet to re-negotiate to a lower speed and the TV may be smart enough to drop to a lower resolution. That you would see. My Sony LED I tested @ 96MB/s which is enough tor 4K. I am not sure what it takes for 3D- Atmos-whatever. It may be more than a Base CAT5 cable can deliver. 8K is. 5e should be good though. 6a has gotten really cheap. Science. Not magic.
Iconoclast speaker and interconnect cables are state of the art MEASURING from one of the top engineers in the wire world. No doubt. But is the sound actually different? Not what you hear, the actual sound. It is possible under the laws of physics, but at a level so far below the source material I seriously doubt it. I would call them excessive, but not snake oil as they are actually carefully designed products with a measurable difference at least in the LAB.
So, a $3000 amp is no good? $3000 speakers no good? The very smoothest amp I have ever heard is on my desk right now. Big beefy 2W Schiit Rekkr costs $150. Of course, this is only good for my desk nearfield and not pushed very hard.
I have had dozens of amps home. Much above $500 there is no correlation between price and sonic quality. Some expensive amps are wonderful " wire with gain". Some add delightful distortions we love. Some sound like crap. Some have well designed feedback and are very load invariant. Some will oscillate with a 4 Ohm load. You can't price categorize them. The cleanest tweeter I know of is the Vifa XT-25 if used at moderate levels above 4K. Costs $25. Play lower or play louder, well then it gets really hard and bucks pile up fast.
Do you know how many hundreds of feet of plain old XLR cables your fancy TITLE MQA file has gone through? Know how distorted the mic was? Love those old AKG tube jobs for vocals. Wonderful distortion. Old mixing board full of hundreds of NE5558 Op amps? Yup. Our brains lie to us all the time. The further down the rat hole we fall, the more they lie.
No complaints about a decent power RF filter, surge suppressor ,and even a DC filter. The power company supplies quality for incandescent light bulbs and motors. So if we need cleaner power, it is up to us as most even boutique makers do a terrible job internally. JDS and Schiit do a pretty decent job BTW. Clean power is NOT going to add weight, air, space, texture, depth, or any adjective a subjective You-Tuber or ad jockey can make up. It just lets your equipment work as intended. Added the Emotivia DC filter when line issues were making my amp toroid buzz. They make pretty decent power line stuff. So does Trip-Lite, Iso-Max, Panamax, Furman and even some Monster.
Again:
Our brains lie
Bad cables are bad
In the digital world we only need a good cable
In the analog world, it is harder but understood and not difficult
Decent power line conditioner is smart.
