Once upon a time when I was developing the single ended valve amp, seen else where on this site, I had an interesting experience with speaker cables. One that was so obvious it left no doubt. I had just finished some tweaks on the amp, and wanted to listen to it, so I hooked it up to one of my speakers with some 4mm test leads. Music came out as expected but there was some thing wrong.

It just didn't sound right. So I spent about an hour poking around with the scope to try and find the problem, maybe some hf oscillation or some thing. Couldn't find a thing. Hooked the amp up with the test leads again and still not right. And then it struck me, with slight intrepidation I connected the amp with my normal speaker cable, and yes that was it. The grungyness had gone!

The most dramatic differences I have heard have between cables occurred with valve amplifiers. It seems less obvious with transistor amplifiers.

My experience of multi-stranded speaker cable has not been that good. Fat ones sound loud and harsh, and thin ones sounds thin and harsh. That is a general observation, I am sure there are exceptions.

Solid core cable sound less harsh.

I will boldly stick my neck out and say that the above applies in varying degrees regardless of price and material (i.e.copper or silver).

Why?

That Goertz stuff, a friend lent me some and it had similar qualities to the cat5. I can only theorise that the reduced loop inductance is some how playing a part amongst other things. There could also be a cable impedance matching thing going on.