Anyone familiar with Straightwire Black Silc

Tim, you will need a high temperature solder pot (full of silver solder) to properly prepare that kind of wire for termination (it vaporizes the enamel insulation and solders all the strands together all at once.)

My recommendation is that you send the wire back to Straightwire and have them cut and reterminate it to your specifications. It's just not worth the hassle and expense of doing it yourself. Plus you'll have factory terminations which increase the resale value. Also, because of Straightwire's particular cable topology, you can use the same cable to make either a balanceed (XLR) or single ended (RCA) interconnect.
.

Thanks for the info. As I said I tried heating the wire; used a small torch my wife bought for caramelizing. The wire was very hot (glowing) but the coating seemed to stay.
I sent an email off to Straightwire. If they don't give me advice then I'll have to send them off. Shame though as DIY is a large part of this hobby's appeal for me.

My Cardas Quadlink 5C is the same way. I was told as well I would need a solder pot. Before I knew this, I ending up using some banana plugs I had on hand. (Cardas and RS gold-plated ones) Seems to work well. Length of spk. wire turned out to be to short in my main system, so I ending up using in a downstairs system w/small monitors. Still I wonder how good the conductivity of such a termination? Do send your cables back to Straightwire.

The reason for the insulated multi-strand wire design (some with a teflon or nylon rod at the core) has to do with solving time smear, and began with Bruce Brisson's (owner of MIT) original design for Monster Cable. The cables consist of two or more different gauges of wire, with the thinner wire wrapped around the heavier wire, which means that for a given length of cable there's a longer length of thinner wire than fatter wire.

Why do this? It became known that HF favors traveling along surfaces and/or thin conductors, and at a higher propagation speed than LF, which tend to favor thicker gauge wire and travel slower. So by making the thin wire longer than the thick wire, the faster HF has to travel further than the slower LF and so they meet up at the other end of the cable at the same time. This leads to better image and soundstage and better rendition of timbres and overtones. Eliminating time smear is the holy grail of cable design.

With cables designed like Straightwire, Monster, MIT (and probably 90% of all other brands) it's essential that all the various wire sizes (which are insulated from each other along the cable itself) be tied together electrically at each end. Otherwise, the high and low frequencies may not take their intended route(s), thus defeating the built-in time smear correction.
.

Wouldn't dispute the science behind that concept but it is hard to concieve seven feet of cable causing a noticeable smearing. It takes better ears or more discerning listening habits than I posess to catch it.