Any speaker cable's sound quality just blown you away?

I found out Home Depot is clearing out their 'audiophile quality' cables and interconnects. I bought two 25 ft. rolls of Carol 16 ga. silver plated OFC wire for $10.00 each. WOW! Best bang for the buck, gentlemen...

Take a look inside your amplifier. See what type of wire the designer has used to connect the output stage to the binding posts. Regardless of whom the manufacturer is, I'd be surprised if it's anything more than Belden or something along those lines. Take a look at the wires inside your speakers, connecting the binding posts to the crossover, and on to the drivers.

Now imagine a two-lane road going to a four-lane bridge, and then back to a two-lane road on the other side. Doesn't make much sense, does it?

Anything over $300 retail for speaker cables is excessive.

Guess I'm very "excessive" based on the previous post :)

MIT Oracle V2/Spectral Ultra Wide-Band.

Phenomenal speaker cables.

Destroyed Synergistic Designer's Reference, which are very highly rated.

Yes, they are VERY expensive, but awesome in the right system.

Read the rather lengthy thread for the Sakura Systems OTL cable half way down the cables page. This 'modest' wire as a revelation.

When considering wire products -- be it speaker, interconnect, or whatever -- bear in mind that wire has the highest profit margin in high-end audio. This provides a HUGE dollar incentive to manufacturers and retailers to make unsubstantiated claims about the product.

Someone who has spent $5large on some garden-hose sized speaker wire, or the latest megabuck "flavor-of-the-month" interconnect, isn't going to take kindly to any suggestion that they may -- just possibly - wasted their money. There was a long thread shortly before this forum got re-vamped talking about "audio susceptibility", and it might be informative to go back and read some of the comments (including the ones I made).

Some of you may, by now, have discovered or subscribed to a new online audiophile journal written by Richard Hardesty, one of the sagest guys for years in the retail audio trade. Richard is now an editor for Widescreen Review magazine, and is publishing his own Internet journal named "The Audio Perfectionist". Here's what Richard Hardesty has to say about cables in Issue #3 of "The Audio Perfectionist":

"High-end cables are the biggest scam in audio, and some of the most expensive ones perform very poorly. But that doesn't mean that cheap ones will do or that cables aren't very important. Cables can dramatically change the sound of an audio system...Good cables are extremely important and the marketplace is a minefield of scam and hype. Anybody with a crimping tool can call himself a cable engineer these days...Don't buy an expensive cable product without carefully listening to it in your own system. Most of the mega-dollar cables are really bad and should be avoided."