Cable elevators - conventional wisdom wrong?

There is no electrical benefit to raising your speaker cable off of the carpet. What noise are you going to couple from a static charge, and how are you going to couple it? The static is not changing so you are not going to couple it via capacitance or inductance. You could run your speaker cable over the top of the terminals of a couple car batteries and it wouldn't make any difference. As to mechanical vibrations, those are not going to get coupled through your speaker cable. You can pick the cable up and shake it and you won't measure a difference in the audio signal (so long as you have good connections at the amp and speaker - and if not, the solution is some type of strain releif of grommet system, not keeping the cable off the carpet.) Try a little experiment. Have someone sit with their back to you listening to music. Pick up a section of cable and move it in front of a CRT. Then take the section of cable and tap it or shake it. Your "blind" observer won't hear any difference in the audio. Perhaps the report of Dark Field elevator only applies to situations involving the Dark Side of the Force. Seriously, from an engineering standpoint this is nonsense, makes about as much sense as passing a magnet over your brachial artery to align the iron in your blood - and I am sure that someone would notice a big subjective difference if they tried that too - they would just "feel better". Spend money on something that actually makes sense. Your carpet is not hurting your audio. Next time you go to a concert see where the cables lie for the recording equipment.

I have also been trying out these techniques with my Cardas speaker cables.
To the contrary, the effects were mixed! It worked at first. The mids and highs were cleaner, the image rose higher. But after a few days, the system sounded as if some bass had been cut off, the mids were also coloured. At the end, I took off all the treatments and it just sounded more natural!

Musicnoise, Thank you! Very entertaining, and very much to the point.

When we talk about elevating speaker cable off the floor, we never talk about the embarrassment factor. What do you say to your mother-in-law? I finally concluded that, if there is a difference, I don't want to know. I'm glad to hear that there are some technical reasons why I need not lose much sleep over this one.

Thank you all. There is a wealth of information here. If I may draw a conclusion at this point: differences, if any, are small enough not to have to worry over my system's performance if I'm not using the Dark Field elevators. On the other hand, I do like to experiment and so will gladly take up some of the suggestions (Justin, sorry, can't engage MusicDirect in this since I'm based in Europe but I'll look out to find someone with a comparable sales policy over here). To me that's one big fun factor in this hobby, always something to discover (even if once in a while the discovery is there's nothing new under the sun after all ;^))

I'll A/B in my second system where I have easiest access, but I can't do it straight away since I've only just made a change that had a considerable sonic impact. I'll report to you guys in a couple of weeks.

Also, sincere thanks for a very matter-of-factual discussion on a topic such as this.