02-22-15: AudiolabyrinthVarious manufacturers of electronic test equipment offer both hand-held and bench type capacitance meters and "LCR meters" (LCR meters can measure inductance as well as capacitance and resistance). Also, some of the better digital multimeters can measure capacitance, although I suspect that in many or most of those cases the resolution and accuracy of the DMM would not be good enough to make meaningful measurements of cables, when measuring capacitance. And I suspect that capacitance meters and especially LCR meters providing resolution and accuracy suitable for measuring cables are likely to cost at least hundreds of dollars, and perhaps thousands for a really high quality instrument.
Almarg, How would all these people be able to measure the capacitance of their speaker cable's and Interconect's?, That would be interesteing to know these measurements.
In any event, regarding the HFC speaker cables I would feel safe in assuming that the capacitance of any speaker cable in which the two conductors are physically separate (i.e., not in the same jacket, and not physically joined together) would be low enough to be insignificant. Inductance is more likely to be important with that kind of cable, especially if cable length is long (since inductance, like capacitance and resistance, is proportional to length), and especially if the speakers happen to be electrostatics (since the impedance of electrostatics typically decreases to low values at high frequencies, while the impedance presented by an inductance rises in proportion to frequency, resulting in that impedance becoming increasingly significant relative to speaker impedance as frequency increases).
It's a completely different story when it comes to line-level analog interconnects, btw. With those cables resistance and inductance are usually unimportant, while capacitance can sometimes be quite important, especially if cable length is long and the output impedance of the component driving the cable is high.
Regards,
-- Al