If we are going to talk seriously about the nature of the electrical properties of an audio cable with respect to audibility, I think we need to come up with some common ground.

I have mentioned this before as a fact we need to establish. And that is, a theoretical perfect cable will transfer a signal from A to B without any change to the signal whatsoever. Since no cable is perfect, then all cables must degrade the signal is some manner.

Secondly, there is a general assertion by some that there are audible properties of a cable that cannot possibly be measured by electronic test equipment. Well I have some experience on very sophisticated electronic devices. In my navy years, we had passive sonar systems that could detect audible signals in the ocean that were actually below the ambient noise floor. Thus, I find this assertion very hard to swallow.

In my own personal experience, I have noted the deficiences of several AV cables. A speaker wire run was too long for the gauge, an interconnect was damaged, and a video cable run was too long adding video distortion. So obviously, you can use an inferior or incorrect cable and notice audible and visible degradations. This is not up for dispute I expect.

But if you take a group of exotic cables and a gang of audio enthusiasts to test them, the results are invariably a wide array of opinions on the sound of those cables. And to add to the fun, it is likely that the opinions change depending on the amount of information the testers have on the cables like the brand, price, etc. And blind testing would likely further change the results.

Perhaps us engineers are delinquent in our explanation as to why all these people hear different sounds when listening to different cables. It could be that we haven't invented the right scientific test equipment but I doubt that.

So in end, 12 gauge zip cord is simply not accepted by audiophiles as suffucient for speaker wire. Therefore, there must be something that this wire is doing to the signal to make it audibly noticable.

It may very well be that the simple fact that nobody to date has pinpointed this deficiency of a simple zip cord, even in a so-called "high resolution" system, could mean that it is not deficient at all.