Muralman - from technical point of view dielectric constant of insulation affects capacitance between wires as well as dielectric absorption. Mylar is horrible and it is leading reason of bright tweeters in cheap speakers. Mylar's dielectric constant is in order of 4 while Teflon is about 1.5. Foamed Teflon is even less and oversized sleeves improve it even more (wires like AQ Sky). There is also factor of skin effect that starts at gage 18 for copper at 20kHz. Can all this be audible? I think we can hear what is even very difficult to measure. There are two ways to deal with skin effect in speaker cables where we need thicker wires (I'm not sure why). One is to use copper tape (often seen in crossover's inductors) but this is often not very practical. Another is to split thick wire into whole bunch of thinner wires. They have to be isolated otherwise current will jump from strand to strand (trying to get outside where resistance is lower because of skin effect) trough impurities. It improves things but wires are still in each other's magnetic field and only surface increased. Remedy for that is to use helical pattern of wire on outside of thick hollow core so that each wire is only in magnetic field of two neighboring wires. Now if you add to this issue of inductance of the wire and purity of the metal things are getting really complicated because not only absolute inductance and capacitance are important but also ratio of them. Poor IC cable might have 25pF/0.5uH per foot while great one might reach 2.5pF/0.05uH. Metal purity and type plays role. Silver cables are very fast snappy sound but copper - even few percent adds dimensionality and reduces brightness. Amount of crystals and impurities between them is also a factor (copper oxide is a semiconductor). Things are way more complicated. I could hear improvement in clarity but have to admit that I bought top of the line IC only because it was cheap (relatively) used. If it is placebo effect - great.
Sorry for this BS in previous post - I didn't mean it. I probably already feel guilty for not helping. My stepfather who is elderly distinguished professor of law was spending his free time in Salvation Army stores to buy as much as possible (to stretch his dollar) sending hundreds of parcels to poor families abroad. When I think of it I feel guilty every-time I spend money (not only for expensive cables).
Sorry for this BS in previous post - I didn't mean it. I probably already feel guilty for not helping. My stepfather who is elderly distinguished professor of law was spending his free time in Salvation Army stores to buy as much as possible (to stretch his dollar) sending hundreds of parcels to poor families abroad. When I think of it I feel guilty every-time I spend money (not only for expensive cables).