Quote Originally Posted by hermanv
My friend and I bought a number of brands of raw wire and then used these wires to make our own cables. We bought the wire from Michael Percy Audio, of the brands he carries the Cardas was reliably good in each price range.

The single biggest effect we found was that woofers just plain like large gauge wire, try for 12 guage or much larger if you can afford it. Next we found insulation did matter with Teflon seeming to be best and the vinyl family about worst. After those two issues metal purity mattered, ultra pure was better, we never tried plated wires, so many variables and a questionable reputation. Connectors also mattered with big heavy lugs doing best (we thought the rhodium plated were nice because fewer contact cleanings were anticipated). Cleaning the connections carefully helped a lot especially on brand new stuff, maybe due to left over oils from manufacturing.

On the whole silver seemed better than copper, but who can afford pure silver wires at 9 guage? The silver had the biggest effect at higher frequencies it was never verified (due to cost) if silver made any real difference on a woofer.

So in the end we tri wired; 9 gauge for the woofer, 11.5 gauge for the mid (the mid goes low in this speaker with a 175Hz crossover) and 16 gauge pure silver for the tweet. Both woofer and mid were pure copper.

All the cables were constructed to minimize inductance; i.e. the wires were laid side by side not twisted or braided, with an alternating hot/return pattern.

In general the higher the crossover frequencies the smaller the gauge needs to be for acceptable results.

One last point, at the cost of quality raw wire most speaker cables did not seem overpriced the better raw wires were not particularly cheap.
It would be interesting how it stacks up to the higher cost spreads and to what you're currently using.