Wires are like ice cream. They come in all different flavors. The good ones are the ones that sound best in your system. Cost is not an effective determiner of end performance. Great sounding wires might cost just a few dollars or thousands.
One feature that clearly matters in many cases is whether the wire is shielded or not. Unshielded wires can pick up noise from nearby electronic devices more easily. Digital devices, switching amps, and power amps or other household devices with large power transformers and RF noise from radio waves are the common sources. LOw level signals like that from MC or even MM phono carts are most susceptible, though line level sources including the signal from pre-amp to power amp can be affected in a quite negative manner that may or may not be apparent from listening by these kinds of EM and RF fields.
I also tend to like wires with network devices that attempt to maintain constant electric properties like impedance by design regardless of length, etc.
It gets a lot greyer after these few things to me.....
DNM reson ICs are inexpensive, simple, and golden in my estimation however are not the best choice in some applications where a shielded wire is called for.
Even teh inexpensive networked ICs from MIT are very good. These are also shielded I believe.
