I'll leave it alone after this post, just hate seeing misinformation out there costing people money that WOULD make a difference elsewhere. The below is from a post of mine at AVS a while ago. This guy was told that silver cables were much better and that is why he should pay several thousand dollars for them.
We have been through this before so I will post the same thing I did in the Dynaudio thread 6 months ago. For speaker wire I would advise you to buy Belden 10 gauge 5T00UP. To uback that spent several thousand dollars on wire please read. If you are very rich and dont care what you spend then bless you but if not then I'm sorry to say you got taken on that wire. I would have bought a pair of C1 or larger contours, spent a hundred bucks on cable and still had money left over and a better sounding system. I have 60k worth of speakers in my home and about 1k worth of wire, trust me if I had 30k in wire and 30k in speakers my systems would not sound as good.
Speaker cable is a bit different from interconnect cables, in several respects. Because speakers are driven at low impedance (typically 4 or 8 ohms) and high current, speaker cables are, for all practical purposes, immune from interference from EMI or RFI, so shielding isn't required. The low impedance of the circuit also tips the balance of concern from capacitance, which is important in interconnect use, to inductance, which, while a concern, can be controlled only to a limited degree. The biggest issue in speaker cables, from the point of view of sound quality, is simply conductivity; the lower the resistance of the cable, the lower the contribution of the speaker cable's resistance to the damping factor, and the flatter the frequency response will be. While one can spend thousands of dollars on exotic speaker cable, in the end analysis, it's the sheer conductivity of the cable, and (barring a really odd design, which may introduce various undesirable effects) little else that matters. The answer to keeping conductivity high is simple: the larger the wire, the lower the resistance, and the higher the conductivity.
There is one respect in which silver is a better material for cable construction than copper: it is slightly (about 5%) less resistive (that is, more conductive) than annealed copper. "Resistance" is the property of any material which causes some of the electricity that flows through it to be converted into heat, and it's fair to say that resistance, in cables, is a bad thing--the less the better. All else being equal, lower resistance ought to be a good thing, and therefore one might think that silver would make for a better cable than copper.
That would indeed be so, but there are some other factors to take into account. First, the resistive loss in high-quality copper cables is already extremely small, because copper, though marginally less conductive than silver, is an extremely conductive metal. For example, Belden 1694A's (.80 per foot) center conductor resistance is 6.4 ohms per thousand feet. In a very long home theater run of 50 feet, then, the resistance of the conductor is 0.32 ohms, representing a minuscule cause of signal loss in a 75 ohm impedance circuit; a solid silver conductor would drop this resistance by about five percent, resulting in a truly infinitesimal improvement.
This infinitesimal improvement might be worth something under extreme circumstances, all else being equal--but all else is rarely equal. First, silver is a more brittle material than copper, compromising the cable's flex-life. To solve this problem, silver is often plated over a copper wire--diminishing the conductivity benefit. Second, the conductivity benefit, as often as not, is offset by a reduction in wire gauge. Going from an 18 AWG conductor to a 20 AWG conductor, for example, results in an increase in resistance of over 50%; this swamps the conductivity benefit of silver, so that an 18 AWG copper conductor is more conductive, not less, than a 20 AWG silver or silver-plated conductor. I use and would advise using Belden 10 gauge wire, good luck finding 10 gauge solid silver wire for less than $500 per foot. When the comparison is between full-sized copper cables and silver-plated mini-coax or wire of tiny gauge, like those one sees in many popular silver cable products, there's no contest; full-sized copper cables are dramatically more conductive, silver or no silver.
There's a lot of mystery surrounding cables, much of it created by those in the business of selling them, and my experience is that the higher the asking price is, the deeper the mystery usually runs. But the fact is that basic, well-known aspects of an audio/video cable are the fundamentals which control whether it conveys a signal poorly, satisfactorily, or exceptionally well. Electrons don't know how much you spend on cable; they only know what your cable looks like inside.
