what do you know"

Al,

There is another way to look at it.

Since technically speaking there is no reason to assume one cable should be any better than another (given your caveats on gauge, properties etc.) then one can conclude that differences are most likely due to the way the equipment behaves. A reasonable engineering "philosophy" is that well designed equipment which is well matched together should be capable of performing perfectly well with any number of acceptable cables. Therefore, if some equipment turns out to be highly dependent or sensitive to a piece of wire than it really might be worth considering to avoid said equipment or its combination in a manner that causes such unreliable performance. (I exclude cables that are designed to be filters or act like an equalizer from these comments - stuff that is deliberately designed to change the sound)

shadorne well said
to be a little more blunt if you got !@#$ equipment you really have to start using cables as equalizers.
Well made an accurate cables are more likely to reveal all your systems flaws even more.
Great cables belong in great systems and people with grappy systems can not fairly assess a great cable due their systems dependence on a cable that offers needed coloration.

There are no differences, it's in your head.

Try this experiment: gather 3-4 cables, from cheap $5 to as expensive you want to go. Get a friend you can trust and get him to randomly hook up the different cables. Tell him to be as tricky as he wants, and do this several times and make sure he records the results of which cables you prefer. Guarantee you will probably pick the $5 cables as often as the $1000 cable.

I have tried this experiment many times with so-called audiophiles. None can ever pick out the expensive cables. Placebo effect. BTW, all the wiring used inside your speakers and components are regular copper wire-nothing fancy, nothing 'magical'.

If someone can actually explain to me in scientific terms how speaker cables make an 'audible' difference I would shut up, but they can't and that's that.

And don't get me started n 'power cords'...

The people who claim they can hear a difference are too scared to b proven wrong, they won't do the test and will make excuses.

Speaker cable has NO MEASURABLE distortion, it's static...it transmits a signal, that's it.

Good luck!

Baroque_Lover,

I wonder if anyone will take you up on your offer to make a test with a friend?

I recall that Mike Lavigne did this exact type test about a year ago and was
unable to pick one good cable over another good cable using his own system
when blind ( but heard a difference when sighted )The test at least showed
that differences between cables are vanishingly small on one of the most
resolving systems on A'gon. I don't recall the details - so excuse me if I didn't
get all the facts straight - but I know that it was a "revelation" that
only someone as decent and generous as Mike Lavigne would admit to. Of
course, I regularly admit to being tin eared so nobody would be surprised if I
could not hear a difference and with my modest system it would prove
nothing, as doubters would just point to my crap system.

Baroque lover, you are not entirely correct. I have in my system a set of SEEC speaker cables that have the correct level of highs, mids, and bottom end. When I tried a set of VD David 2.0's, the bottom end increase was dramatic, so much so, that I had to pull them from the system. They are for sale in the classifieds now. If these were to be switched in with the ones I have now, I could tell in a minute which ones were in. The same goes for a new power cord I put on my CDP. It increased the bass so much, I had to take it out. Maybe the people you tried this with cannot tell, but don't group everyone in with your group. There are alot of different ways of going about trying this test, and it doesn't sound like it was very controled.
Just because some folks can't hear the difference doesn't make it snake-oil. If it doesn't work for you, fine, let it go. No need to discredit the folks who posted above that do hear a difference.