My "good reason" is to see what happens. Some people are willing to throw a little cash at something they are curious about, and others are satisfied to read reviews on the internet and leave it at that. I'm one of the former.
I'm of the 'What will my curiosity cost me' club.
I am going to state, right from the start, that I'm too old and have been in this hobby as both an amateur and as someone earning a living from audio in one way or another to engage in argument, debates, or defence of one thing or another. What you see is what you get. Take it or leave it; I do not care whether you agree or disagree, and although I most certainly welcome your alternate take, I'm not interested in challenging anyone or defending what I believe.
What target or goal are in intending to hit other than providing some information? If any?
I do what I do because I want to do it, nothing more and nothing less, and if I feel like it, I report my conclusions, my still unanswered questions, and where I think it should go from there. This particular site is far from the ideal forum for the curious, because it's populated by a faction of people who *know everything* and waste no time in challenging anyone who dares think differently from the foregone conclusion.
I don't preclude data. But anecdata (opinion) is just as easily dismissed with opinion. But some hard data, independently re-producible and verified data is always welcome.
Looking at a loudspeaker cable as an entity to itself is, in my opinion, a mistake. Power Amplifiers vary more than virtually any audio component in design and construction, and the cable between amp and crossover is part of a system. Resistance is not a huge issue in most home system speaker length applications, but capacitance and inductance can and do affect amplifier performance and, in more instances than many realize, power amplifier stability.
Then I would say using common speaker level cables (Belden, Liberty, Canare, GepCo etc...) presenting a problem in combination with a power amp then the problem is the power amp.
I've yet to see any competent amplifier exhibit oscillation or phase problems due to properly designed speaker cables. FYI I designed and architechted A/V, DAW, and Live sound systems for 7 years. AMX, Crestron, Extron, Grass Valley, NewTek, Pinnacle, Media 100, Genelec, JBL, Crown, QSC, Bryston, Benchmark, BSS, Lake Processing, Lab Gruppen, Apogee, the list goes on....
For those of you that are left, it's my belief that amplifiers most obviously reveal their sonic signature when asked to operate near the edge of their performance envelope. As an example, amplifiers have distinct sonic attributes when operating at the onset of clipping, and if you drive your speakers at high levels, you are going to hear the differences between two amplifiers of different topology.
You aren't hearing a difference you are hearing how an amplifier is failing.
So, at a minimum, we must establish that those values (capacitance, inductance, resistance) form part of the attributes of our ideal loudspeaker cable. Because there is so much variation in power amp topology, we can't simply assume that if our loudspeaker cable works in one, or some, applications, that our work is done.
Then ask the amplifier designer what is the best speaker cable to use.
Silver-coated copper is used for the exact same reasons it carries a Military Specification for Aircraft and Aerospace applications (and many other military or medical applications) ... it protects against copper corrosion, which with copper oxides significantly affects it's electrical performance. Combined with the skin effect, well, it's better if you don't have to deal with corrosion. So I choose not to deal with it by specifying silver-coated copper wire.
Skin effect is BS for 20Khz applications.
Oxidation: Tin the cable ends.
Silver oxides are relatively good conductors, so corrosion of the silver outer coating is not a detriment to electrical performance.
So is tough pitch copper.
Part of the typical MilSpec for that application is PTFE dielectric (DuPont Teflon© or equivalent). PTFE is the closest to ideal dielectric (air) for solid material, we can call that "good enough". (There are higher-performing dielectrics, whereby air is incorporated to create a foamed, rather than solid, dielectric).
I have some of a spool of 14AWG CL2 cable left from an install over 10 years ago.... Hold on a sec...
Ok, I dug it out of the basement. The copper is nice and shiny.
PTFE / Teflon dielectric is temperature and flame resistant. It's used due to it's safety rating. It was never designed around audio performance.
Some have answered the question for themselves and really don't need to re-evaluate their choices, and that's fine. As for myself, I am much more comfortable with examining the potential issues and solutions, to simply "find out for myself" if conventional wisdom is valid or not. I don't expect others to feel the same way, and don't care if anyone agrees, disagrees, or has a sudden, unusual interest in my financial health.
I stick with well engineered products from manufacturers I've already mentioned. I don't go bottom of the barrel no name Chinese product. But you don't have to go to $130 cable extreme either.
For full disclosure I have a pair of MIT EXP2 speaker cables ~$260. If you can pick them out 19/20 blind roll of the dice you can have my Statements ;-) vs my Belden 5000ue that cost me ~$16.
2000% the cost for 0% performance gain.
