Danny said:
So in your investigations did you find a difference between
a) Cheap bell wire
Solid core mains wire
c) Dedicated speaker cables
What I don't understand, from a scientific point of view, is why there should be any difference in the ability of different sorts of cable to transmit the sorts of electrical signals generated by a hi-fi system.
Yes.
Bell wire was a bit crappy, but solid core mains wire sounded pretty good. I then invested in QED 79 strand and gold plated connectors and really found it a bit dull after the solid-core mains wire.
Then my mate up the road who ran a lighting and disco hire company liberated miles of unknown multistrand cable, with each copper strand individually coated silver and it was fab! Ugly installation though as they were thick individual cables, so bi-wired that meant 4 fat cables to each speaker. And they were really heavy too. But they cost me a couple quid and sounded better than anything else I'd tried. Couple of mates also bought some reels too. It was popular 'till it ran out.
IIRC, speaker cables exert a load on an amplifier which affects the amp, also a large bass cone exerts a current into the cables as well, so cables are not exactly passive.
Professional electronics work in a different environment with different signal strengths and powers, so the issues might be different. One can imagine that the requirement of a PA system is different from your living room Hi-Fi, so there are different compromises.
I've also used cheap and more expensive interconnects and they make a difference too. Not earth shattering, but it all adds up.