Lstening impressions of our home brew cables:

This is tough. There are so many brands and price points I can only relate to a small selection of commercial cables used in the same system. None of these exceeded $900 in cost.

Maybe it's worth knowing my taste in sound. I like detail well enough, but hate that hardness or glare that often accompanies it. So I tend to lean a little towards warm or soft. I used to own C-J equipment, it was too far in that direction for me (I understand their newer stuff is lesss so).

So I want good impulse response, deep and detailed bass (it's surprising how much is hidden in that bass signal when inferior cables are used). Most of us are used to this I think so that it sounds normal. A good big gauge will bring out details you just didn't know where there.

For midrange, a very tough album is the ARC Choir. The massed voices easily drift into hard or harsh especially when they hit a massed peak. The hand claps also can easily become edgy. A good cable makes it far easier to hear the difference between the male and female handclaps, a good cable increases the number of distinct individual handcalps that can be distinguished. Our homemade cables did this very well.

For the tweeter a pure silver cable just seemed clearer, bigger gauges were better , but as I said, at some point the cost became prohibitive and we stopped going bigger. I am 58 years old and my treble hearing ain't what it used to be. Still the difference between the Homegrown 4 nines silver and a Cardas 5 nines silver used in our homemade cable was audible. The Cardas was noticably less strained. The Tweeter is the Scan Speak Revelator.

Larger gauges on the whole helped dynamics as well, in certain club recordings background voices actually come and go with various cables (more so with interconnects, but also with speaker cables). It's a cliche, but sound exploding out of a black background is more so with our home made cables that any commercial cables we tried.

Hope that helps, as I write I know there are endless details required to explain this well, details about equipment, crossovers components, drivers, room treatment, etc. etc. So I'll stop here maybe enough to give you a broad idea of the result.