I’ll just leave this here for anyone with an interest in high end audio
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Who knew that just being suitably conductive without picking up any interference would work?
The amount of snake oil being sold in Hi-Fi stores would even make Steve Jobs suck his teeth.
Been using Banana plugs for years and normally Ground my earth 
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What a waste of ink. Do we know what the respective resistance, inductance and capacitances are of these materials?
Not mentioned, I think the point was the very special audiophiles couldn’t hear a difference born out by incorrect answers. We are talking about folks who buy expensive little bridges to lift the cables from the floor etc. whilst you can actually have equipment to measure the faintest electrical signal, capacitance and resistance together with induction transfer between parallel cable runs, for most the little cochlear hammer and nerves just cannot.
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I always used simple bell wire for my speakers which worked and sounded absolutely fine. Got better stuff these days but I’d bet that if I went back to bell wire I wouldn’t tell the difference.
I like oxygen free 79 strand. Anything more esoteric than that can get stuffed.
The thing is that when you apply “equipment to measure the faintest electrical signal, capacitance and resistance together with induction” to a stupid idea such as little blocks of whatever esoteric material the vendor has come up with you discover that there is no difference whether our ears could discern it or not.
Then you get into the territory of “oh but this is too advanced to measure” and other snake oil claims.
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Yes I think we all began there. I have done my own limited experiments over the years and some cables alter to sound to a preferred sound over lesser cable. The horrible thick Naim cable did a great job of giving bass to the bass box of a set of the original Bose accoustimas speakers whilst the relatively thin QED kudos opened up the mid and treble to the satellite speakers. Test was the death star explosion when compared to the Bose supplied 79 strand.
Years later and I use QED XT and there is to my ears an audible change to soundstage. Spent a bit more on their special anniversary silver XT blah blah and didn’t notice any improvement so that’s as far as I would go. My brother made some Cat6 multiple braided carpet python leads which may have improved over the 79 strand but were huge and bloody ugly as well as time and cable consuming to make. In the end speaker placement and room acoustics have a far bigger impact than any cable.
Quite.
QED 79 strand is ubiquitous, cheap, will handle 25A - so roughly 1kW into 4Ω and 2kW into 8Ω and comes in all sorts of colours to match your decor. What’s not to like?
It’s fancy 2.5mm2 by the way so you could always substitute some mains flex if you want.
The only weakness is that, at about 16mΩ a metre, you might be slightly wary of runs of more than 10m
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Ah but solid copper and the skin effect over multi strand……oops here we go again 
At 20kHz the skin effect is about 0.46mm - way larger than the conductors in 79 strand. Even 8 strand has individual conductors with smaller diameter than you need to start worrying about skin effect.
You’ll be telling me wires are directional next 
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I can’t even hear 20kHz!
Me neither - not even my tinnitus goes that high
I get puffs from hifi mags. I droop and wish - a pair of Fyne Audio floorstanders, something beefy from Musical Fidelity, a top class CD transport + whizzo DAC …
Then I remember that the stuff I have - Marantz 6005, Monitor Audio Bronze 5, a Samasonic DVD player to play CDs, QED 79, fancy interconnects intended for ICE, picked up for pennies - makes a perfectly acceptable noise which is highly modified by room acoustics, whatever ambient noise is going on, my tinnitus, my level of attention …
I’ve spent 100’s of hours in top class recording studios. Common to all is a pair of speakers perched on the desk that are used to assess the sound as might be heard by the average Joe/Jill. Back in the day they were Yamaha N10s- everybody used these. Obviously, whatever the sound from them was not the defining criterion for the mix but it was an attempt to remain in contact with the real world.
There is a creature known as ‘Golden Ears’. A friend who worked [maintenance engineer] for years at Virgin Records ‘Town House’ studios believed that one had come to produce an album for an HM band - Golden Ears specialised in HM. Sound levels in the control room were punishing. How GE could hear anything, nobody could understand.
G.E. announced on day, “There’s a hole around 600Hz.” There was a lot of eye-rolling amongst the maintenance crew but they got out the meters and Lo! There was a dip around 600Hz!
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BIL was playing at new year in a pub with low ceilings a lot of glass (it looked out over the sea) my ears picked up a big peak around 60hz creating a nasty booming base. Confirmed by my phone app so asked him to adjust his crossover settings. Duly complied and the audience were happy, his singer said, I wondered what was causing that as the equipment was still setup from the last hall with 4m ceilings.
A pal has a selection of tiny black plastic boxes scattered around his sitting room. Under the TV itself is a bigger box that emits ‘bass’. This is supposed to be a ‘surround sound’ system. The ‘bass box’ thing produces a dreadful booming noise that is actually painful to hear.
My pal is one of those people who will not accept any level of criticism about anything. He maintains that this bass box is perfect. It very much is not, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Music from the TV is awful.
What makes his attitude all the more regrettable is that in his yoof he worked at Thames TV studios in the sound dept. Perhaps just trailing mic cables behind moving cameras.
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That is fairly impressive.
Apropos the ability to recognise D5 (~600Hz: I looked it up, remembering that reference A is 440), I recall hearing someone describe frequencies in terms of what instruments typically made them. So a splash cymbal might be 2kHz, a kick drum 100Hz (those figures won’t be right).
A good sound engineer would know which frequencies to cut and which to boost, though I doubt with the accuracy of Golden Ears.
He got quite a reputation as a producer of H.M.
He engineered some of an album by Jade Warrior [jazz-fusion?], friends of mine, at Virgin’s Manor Studio in Oxon. He was asked to lug a 4x4 cab 100m out into the grounds, mike it up to record ambient sounds - there’s a particularly vivid blackbird alarm call on this section. He grumbled all the while, doing this.
As a result his name credit on the album was ‘typo’d’ from Nick to Mick or vice versa.
What 
Jobs is renowned for his commitment to simplicity.