Thanks to 31 years working with "consumer audio", speaker wire and cables are a favorite rant. Before I got into that business, speaker manufactures and the local dealers of what was considered high end gear recommended lamp cord of increasing thickness dependent on run length. In 1980 I wound up working at one of the dealers I used to haunt and about that same time, Monster Cable made their debut with speaker wire. Since then that segment of the business mushroomed with lots of new wire and cable companies entering that market. When 5.1, 6.1 & 7.1 hit the shelves, I'm sure those guys thought they'd died and gone to heaven. The profit margins of cable and interconnects is huge so the encouragement to up sell is obvious.
They all wanted to re-invent the wheel. Some of the speaker wires examples were novel to rediculous and solid copper was a fad for a while because of the "skin effect". High frequencies are supposed to gravitate to the outside of a conductor and low frequencies to the center therefore, multi stranded was a negative. I and my co-workers experimented with solid wire but none of us noticed any difference and we concluded if there was any difference it was not audible.
We all liked the idea of oxygen free copper wire and usually incorporated 12 gauge runs of that in our systems. I surprised myself once by setting up a sound room demo with garden variety 16GA speaker wire (silver one side one side copper) on one channel, oxygen free Monster on the other, pre-amp in mono and used the balance control for a side to side comparison. There was a demonstrable difference so we all sold upgraded wire with lots of systems. One of the HiFi magazines printed an article once claiming a 10% rule whereby that much of a system's cost should be spent on speaker wire and interconnects and we used that extensively.
Sometime in the early 1990's the Denon/Mission rep for the company I was with started carrying Kimber Kable. He at least owned good gear and was a HiFi hobbyist - most weren't. Since he had a personal interest in audio he did his research and what he said made sense. I bought some Kimber 4VR (grey & black) speaker wire for myself, think it is good choice and as far as I know, still available today. It has two grey conductors and two black each with 7 strands of oxygen free conductors of varying thicknesses and the insulation is teflon. I use a single length to bi-wire my speakers. By now, Kimber have more expensive series' of speaker wire (they'd be crazy not to for business reasons) but they still have 4VR and 4PR. 4PR (black & brown) is the same as 4VR except the 7 strands per insulator are the same thickness. They should also still have 8VR (4 black - 4 grey) & 8PR (4 black - 4 brown) but 8 strands is twice the cost of 4 strands.
I soldered cheap banana plugs on the ends not because they sound better (they don't) but for easy disconnect when I have to shift stuff out of the way. If things stayed put indefinitely, I would just be using bare wire as I have for years.
On a side note, the "Specialty Audio" buyer (high end stuff) for that retailer (multi-store so lots of money) was a friend of mine and he had on loan a pair of Kimber interconnects made with pure silver wire and worth about $1500 at the time. I happened to win some Kimber PBJ interconnects in a sales contest (same thing except copper not silver) and worth $100. We compared my PBJ's with garden variety interconnects and there was a distinct difference. Comparing the $100 PBJ to the $1500 silver version,
if there was a difference, it was barely noticeable. Another co-worker who designed and built power and pre-amps under the name CK Electronics called it the "knee curve" - how much does one spend for diminishing improvement.
If you can find Kimber Kable 4VR or 4PR get some of that but a decent oxygen free copper speaker wire would be good too. I remember reading an article on this topic by an engineer who said he doubts whether an electron knows what material it's travelling in. Look at the wires in your amplifier(s) and look at the wires in your speakers. Also, not to be overlooked is that those Kimber Kable speaker wires are braided therefore look cool - a high nifty factor.
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Roger Russell – a former engineer and speaker designer for McIntosh Labs details how expensive speaker wire brand marketing misinforms consumers in his online essay called Speaker Wire – A History. He writes, "The industry has now reached the point where [wire] resistance and listening quality are not the issues any more, although listening claims may still be made...The strategy in selling these products is, in part, to appeal to those who are looking to impress others with something unique and expensive."
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm
I believe in that 10% rule to a point. But, if someone's got the coin to spend $100,000 on a system, they can probably afford $10,000 on wires and cables. There are after all bragging rights.
Does anyone put dixie cups under their speaker leads anymore or those special non-magnetic floor decoupling speaker wire suspension pylons? Green felt pen ink to coat the edge of a CD? No coffee or tea 1 to 2 hours before listening your system? Affects the hearing don't you know.
