Over the years I've posted several times about the whole cable sound issue. I'd like to repeat a short form of some of those posts. I am a believer, if you're not, save both of us some pain and skip to the next post.

1. I am an EE by trade, professsionally I was strongly biased against the whole wire has a signature phenominum. I did a little math and quickly concluded the differences between any two reasonable wire choices would be so small as to be inaudible.

2. My dealer recommended I borrow a speaker cable and listen for myself. I invited over several friends to attempt a test. No, it was by no means a blind test.

3. The results surprised everyone in the room, one wire set was clearly cleaner sounding than the other, both were a reasonable gauge 12 and 14 I think (It was many years ago and the smaller gauge was the better sounding).

4. Many years later I had gravitated to fairly expensive wires and decided I just couldn't afford the next step up. So my friend and I set about making our own cables. We did a lot of reading on the various manufacturers sites and soon discovered some clear parallels in what each manufacturer was doing.

5. We made several cables, each step up in sound quality was obtained by emphasizing what the cable manufacturers said would work (low dielectric absorbtion for interconnects, low inductance and large gauge for speakers, we also confirmed that high metal purity and quality connectors were needed to get the best out of any given design).

6. The cables got more complex, the materials cost went up and the quality, as we heard it, kept getting better. It was about at this point that we discovered much to our surprise that the cable vendors were not on the whole ripping anybody off. To make cables as good as their best involved very expensive materials and connectors. Allowing for some profit and mark-up, our best cables cost about half of the commercial competition, but we had no labor, packaging, avertizing or distributor mark up costs..

7. The best commercial cables unfortunately involve construction techniques that simply can't be duplicated at home. i.e very high conductor counts and lots of thin wall teflon tubing or better yet foamed teflon for interconnects and just sheer volume of high purity expensive metals aranged in a Litz wire configration for speakers.

Cables affect the soud of every quality audio system I've ever heard, Although I know some techniques to make cables that sound better, I don't know all the reasons why this should be so.

Borrow some cables and listen for yourself. It costs you only time and might just increase the enjoyment of your system.