the only high dollar wire whose cost can be somewhat justified IMO, are the ones based on solid silver... silver has increased in price significantly in the last few years.   And this would cause silver plated wire to rise some also... but silver-plated wire has a few microns of silver coating on it at best.  so listen carefully here and try before you buy.

The other thing that you rarely see discussed in depth, at least from the perspective that it actually affects, is the termination, or the connector.  There are a lot of very smart people with decades of electrical engineering experience, training and knowledge that will tell you that for speaker wire, the best connector is "no" connector.  Because the connector is likely to have different metallurgy than the wire, a different impedance than the wire, etc.  I think Steve even lives in this camp.  By the same notion, “no” insulation, i.e. “air” is the best insulation.  RCA plugs and jacks are a total crapshoot too… no clearly defined industry standard and they vary wildly.  The exception being 75 ohm connectors for coaxial wire for video signals and generally s/pdif digital signals also.

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I once fell for some of the ridiculous claims made by some of the boutique wire companies.  There came a day, when I participated in my first volume matched to within  1/10th of a volt measured at the speaker terminals AB/X test, that changed my perspective on the hi-end wire industry game forever.  Yes there is wire that generally has a certain “affect” on the sound, and sometimes the effect is desirable and sometimes not.  And there is a lot of reasonably priced wire that is “accurate” and “neutral”.  A lot of people would be stunned to discover, if given the opportunity to have it demonstrated to them, that typically, the more expensive and “exotic” the design… the more “tailoring” of the sound the wire does.  I thinks it just makes far more sense to use competent wire, based on sound, long-established, electrical parameters that can be had for reasonable costs and spend your hard earned $$ on better components… or the most ignored component of 99% of systems – room acoustics.  You’ll get far more for your $$$.

what I find quite entertaining at times, is the latest "revelation" in speaker wire or IC's, where the creator has gone to great length and in some cases, expense, to create some hi-tech solution to a problem that has already been solved long, long ago.  Yet they present it as "new", "radical", "revolutionary".  They just seem to take great satisfaction in impressing themselves with their discovery of a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.  And then they come up with some wild marketing to spin it on the naïve and gullible.  Caveat emptor applies here more than just about anywhere else, with the possible exception of the used car business, and late night infomercials!  Do not miss my point…yep… most of them do “affect” the sound – and you may like the effect, but you may not.  And you may very likely be strangling the true performance potential of your system.  But doesn’t it make more sense to use “neutral” conduits of the electrical signal, at reasonable cost, and let the components, your speakers and your room acoustics determine the sonic personality of your system?  I’m just saying…. From a logical and deductive reasoning standpoint, this just makes more sense.

Want to have some fun?  Have you ever attended the RMAF?  Of course take along your favorite reference tunes to listen to on the hundreds of systems and components on display – everybody does.  What everybody doesn’t do, is take along a set of speaker cables and a couple pair of IC’s that are their reference and/or known to be neutral/accurate in the best sense.  Not too many of the exhibitors will let you change cabling… but you might be surprised how many will.  This is not something I go around trying to do, just to see if I can get away with it.  Something I hear or detect as “wrong” has to be present before I spend my time doing this.  One year I went in to a room that had a combination of components and speakers that should have been making some righteous sound.  I had heard the gear before in other systems and even owned a different model of speaker from the speaker company and models from the amp/preamp brand before as well.  The exhibitor was in a good size room, one of the larger suites, so it shouldn’t have been all the rooms fault either.  The sound in this room was so dull, flat and lifeless it was just embarrassing IMO for the exhibitor.  So I was looking for what was “wrong”.  The only complete unknown to me was the speaker cable and IC’s in use.  No name dropping hear.  But suffice it to say, the speaker cable was huge… like a python laying there on the floor, with large “boxes” on the ends that were probably full of resistors, capacitors, inductors, lord knows what else – at least a large dose of ferry dust and real eye-candy dressing.  I thought “hmmmm”.  I kindly ask the exhibitor if I could come back late, after the show officially closed that evening and listen to the system again – and substitute my wire.  Guy looked at me like I had not two, but three heads… “why would you want to do that?”.  I didn’t tell him that his $150,000 display sucked arse.. I just said, for a “reference”.  I was genuinely interested in the speakers on display.  He said, “well, I guess we could do that – what do you have?”.  I showed him, he kind of grinned.. and said “sure”.  So confident was he, that my wires would just completely ruin this wonderful sounding system he had on display(not) and degrade it into an intolerable mass of noise.
Evening came, I went back and there were other “after hours” attendees.  There was a guy there about to write a check for the speakers on the spot.  Not sure what his reference was, but he seemed like he had drank about 4 pots of coffee too much, and just could not part with his $$ fast enough.  He definitely “drank the kool-aid” already and his credit card had already been debited.  Anyway… I had to endure him listening to this system sounding like mud, while he continued to try and convince himself that it was the greatest thing he’d ever heard.  Nothing could convince this guy that this system sounded horrible.  Throw a big heavy comforter over your speakers and you can get an idea what it sounded like.  Finally, I got my chance.  We removed the super-sonic, space-modulated, hyper-spiraled, quantum physics manipulated, etc. etc. cables and installed my lowly cables.  Fifteen seconds into the first song played, the over excitable prospective buyer decided he needed to go home and change his wires…. When he left, the exhibitor came over to me and ask me if he could use my cables for the rest of the show.  I smiled, another true believer had just been enlightened.  Then he admitted, that prior to the show, he had never heard these cables used in his equipment before… it was a manufacturer to manufacturer agreement for the show…. I kindly suggested, he might want to listen to the combination of components he was going to display at the show - “before” the show next time.  I rested my case – and took my wires with me too!  

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This is great insight... And I'm not sure if you've ever read some of the articles on Audioholics such as Debunking the Myth of Speaker Cable Resonance, Audioquest Cable Theories Exposed and Dielectric Absorption in Cables Debunked but they are excellent articles and real engineering tests are done be Gene ... he's not afraid to get into it with cable manufacturers either ... you could say he's on the $h!t list of Audioquest and Transparent to say the least.

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This is not a bad idea ... They are OFC Pure Copper after all and since they are so cheap and I already have 5 sets (I had them in a 5.1 setup a while ago) I could simply cut the bananas off a pair and go straight to bare wire to see if that makes any improvements.  

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He has one of the biggest followings on Steve Hoffman's forums that I've ever seen.  He must be doing something right!  I've noticed the trend seems to be going towards solid metals with Morrow, Clear Day, etc., but Grover is using ribbons with a combo of different metals ... I wonder how this compares to the others out there.  Grover's are $400 for a 10' pair with your choice of terminations which are slightly cheaper than a pair of Zen Styx.

Anybody hear of Tempo Electric?  They seem to have a nice product:

1. .9999 pure, (solid) silver wire,
2. Jacketed in an oversized PTFE (Teflon) tubing,
3. Oversized tubing = air as the dielectric constant.

Their philosophy is that:

The temper (degree of hardness) is actually more important to good sound than the ultimate degree of purity. Once we tried it, it became immediately clear that the extra soft grade of silver exhibited dramatically less glare and more detail in the upper frequencies then the more commonly available regular or medium temper wire. This is the critical area of the sound spectrum which allows us, as listeners, to perceive the minute aural cues which characterize and differentiate various performance spaces.

That said the very minimum gauge recommended for my setup would be 14 gauge at $684, but highly recommend 12 gauge at $894.  Out of my price range, but they seem like a solid design and get a lot of check marks with the latest trends.

Just wanted to revisit this thread as there is so much awesome info in it.  And that I finally had my "Lon" moment or cable epiphany!

When I first purchased my Omega Speakers, Louis (the owner), was in the middle of designing 3 different drivers for his RS7 line.  

(a) RS7 (regular drivers from 44 - 20kHz),
(b) RS7V (vintage drivers from 44 - 15kHz),
(c) RS7A (alnico drivers from 44 - 18kHz).

At the time of purchase Louis only had the Vintage drivers ready, so he sent those to me and told me to let him know if I liked them.  At the time I started looking for cables I had a pair of 14g OFC copper cables that I picked up for like $20 and they were decent enough, but I always felt there was something missing at the top end of the speakers, so I thought I needed cable that wasn't as warm as copper and decided to try a few silver cables.  I tried the Clear Days and a couple of others listed above, but they did not make enough of a noticeable difference (for the money).  Then LR sent me some Zen Styx like cables and they really gave a little shimmer on the top end.  They were by the far the most effective at adding a little something to the top end that I felt was missing using the RS7V drivers and I was mostly using this in a near field listening situation.

After living with the Vintage drivers for a while and moving to a new place where I'm further away from the near field position than I was before ... I came to the conclusion that despite the great midrange, they were just too rolled off in the highs for my tastes.  Even though I'm almost 49 and I can't hear too much above that these days, I still felt as if something was missing and things such as cymbals did not decay as much as I would have liked and sounded a tad muffled, it was almost as if the drummers were in the back alley of the recording studio (not in the same room).  So I contacted Louis and told him, he said the Vintage drivers are tuned that way for a specific sort of sound and being the great guy he is, Louis sent me a pair of the RS7 regular drivers which have an extended upper range in comparison (free of charge).

So I swapped the new Regular drivers in and sent the old ones back to Louis and tried not to listen too critically until I got a hundred hours or so on them.  But I noticed right away that something was not sounding right and every cymbal tap (no matter if it was a hi-hat, ride and even gongs and cowbells) all I heard was "tisk, tisk, tisk".  Well I gave them some time, but the "tisk" sound never went away and it was getting to me so badly that it's all I could hear and focus on when listening to music so it was basically ruining my musical enjoyment.  

I was very bummed out and thought that I actually made a turn for the worse by getting the new drivers and by their extended range were now showing other weaknesses/problems within my setup.  So I went through a process of elimination ... first I tried the source and it did not make a difference, then with and without the preamp and that made no difference either.  So then I thought screw it, maybe it is just a dirty little secret that single driver owners never talk about and I was getting some type of Doppler effect, so I'm going to buy a new set of speakers.  The problem with that is with the Taboo I'm limited to and need very efficient speakers and they can get expensive, so I spent a month or so reading up on efficient speakers and what else was out there, but came to the conclusion that I could not afford another pair of speakers and I was just going to have to tough it out.

It was at that point I remembered reading a post by Dave (from Dave's Cables which is one of the original venders I was looking into in the first place) on the Audio Circle forums that certain silver over copper cables can introduce a tizziness to speakers that was especially apparent in efficient single drivers that don't use crossovers.  At the time I blew it off because (1) the Vintage drivers were too rolled off to notice any tizziness, and (2) Dave sells speaker cables and thought that perhaps he was just looking to get me interested in his cables a little more .  BUT as a last ditch effort I went to my garage and got out my original OFC $20 copper cables, swapped then back in and voilà ... all tizziness = gone!

It was at that point I came to my first conclusion that speakers cables may be more system/speaker dependent than I thought.  My second conclusion was that even though the old cables fixed the tizziness problem, things sounded dull and did not have the liveliness of the Zen Styx style cables.  So I contacted Dave (Dave's Cables which is now ZenWave Audio) and thanked him for posting that as I didn't even think it could have been the cables, we exchanged a few emails and he said he would send me out a couple of his cables to see if I liked any of them better than what I was currently using and if I did he would make me a pair and if not no worries just send them back at his expense, so I couldn't refuse and a couple days later I got a box of his goodies.

He sent me a pair of his SL version of UP-OCC speaker cables in 20g and 17g sizes.  The 20g is a side by side run and the 17g has a braided geometry (he also sent me a couple different pairs of his interconnects to try out ~ the ZenWave DD which uses Dueland Silver and ZenWave D3 which is a UPOCC Silver and Gold alloy).  Back to the speaker cables ... they actually look like and are about as thin as shoestrings ... in fact if you swapped them into a pair of Chuck Taylors I don't think anybody would be the wiser .  When I first got them I was sort of expecting a hefty cable similar to the Zen Styx and/or my OCF 14g copper cables, but they are pretty light and flexible.

* These are pictures of the demo 17g, not the finished product which is much nicer.




Well I've never listened so intently to speaker cables before. Literally I've been swapping the 2 speaker cables back and forth and even had my lady and my 15 year old boy both sit down with me at separate occasions for a good intensive listening session and they both gave me "the same" feedback. I tried not to get involved with their decisions and let them both know that there is no right or wrong with the cables and to just let me know which ones they liked better and why. What was unexpected is that we all came to the same conclusions on sound and preference.

We listened to 3 songs on each cable ~

(1) Ani DeFranco - 32 Flavors. I chose this song as it has great sort of breathy female vocals and there is a lot of percussion involved (especially in the beginning).

(2) Miles Davis - Saeta (from Sketches of Spain). I chose this songs as the percussion starts off very delicate and clicky (if that's even a term) and then builds, and the sound stage moves from left to right subtly ... one minute you're hearing percussions on one side and then horns move to the right ... really just a mesmerizing track.

(3) Neil Young - Cortez The Killer. This has to be one of THE most classic rock songs of all time, the guitar work is outstanding (no doubt as its one of Rolling Stones greatest guitar solos of all time), but the cymbal work on this track is especially outstanding in the recording as well. I can't think of another song in my library that matches the awesome recording of the cymbals and percussion on that track.

All tracks were 192/24 hi-res and used with a McIntosh C220 preamp, Decware Taboo MK II amp, Rega DAC, Omega RS7 Loudspeakers and an Asus VivoPC with Windows 8.1 and JRiver MC 19 (line leveled and volume was set the same throughout the entire listening duration).  The speaker cables used were Dave's SL UPOCC Copper in 17 and 20 gauges and compared to my 14 gauge Oxygen Free Copper cables.  All with bare terminations which is how I prefer them (with tinned/silver soldered ends to keep them from fraying).

I don't know a lot of audio terms, so I'll just try to explain the differences and what I heard with each one.

I first tried the 20g side by side as they are the least expensive and (being the cheap bastard that I am) if I could get away with a cheaper version that didn't make that huge of a difference compared to the more expensive version then that's one that I'm going to go for.

First off, both the 20 and 17 gauge speaker cables are fast compared to the Oxygen Free Copper cables I had before. And both cables are good at the retrieval of information. But to be 100% honest, the thing was that even though the 20g were better than the OFC copper cheapy cables I had in there, I could not justify the price difference.  After first demoing the 20g I again thought that I just don't have the golden ears that Lon, Stone, Will and a lot of you other guys seem to have.

But that is where the road ends. After swapping in the braided 17 gauge and began listening, I was taken aback immediately! First off, we all thought that the percussion instruments sounded live, as if they were almost in front of us. The 20 gauges were good at this as well, but they sounded as if the drummer was further in the background in comparison.

The 17's however sounded as if the drummer was literally in front of us. Things that were in the background moved forward as if on the same stage or plane as the other players. I've never heard this happen on another cable and seriously ... I never thought that speaker cables would have this dramatic of an effect on my system, but with the 17s there has been a retrieval of information and a placement of the musicians up front that I was not expecting to happen. To say that this made a difference in my musical enjoyment is an understatement as I couldn't stop listening to music going way into the early AM.

OK, so here's my comparison of Dave's 17ga vs 20ga after a couple weeks of listening. The 20 gauge seems faster and the bass seemed a tad more taught and focused, they were better than the cheap 14g OFC cables I had in there and if I never heard the 17g braided cables I would have easily chosen them over the 14g OFC. However the 17's retrieved WAY more info, the decay of instruments (especially cymbals) was off the charts and spooky real, the bass (while not as taught as the 20g) was fuller and the tones overall much richer, and the 17g preserves fine detail in note decay and reverb trails better than anything I've heard to this point. IMO, the 20 gauges are really good, but the 17's are probably the most significant upgrade to my system that I have heard to this date.

It's at this point I began to say to myself ... Hmmm now I know what Lon and you other guys with the Golden Ears have been talking about all this time!

Sorry for the long winded exercise in getting my thoughts together about these cables, but just wanted to say if you're looking for a good set of cables at a reasonable price, the 17g braided is only $219 plus shipping (if you go with bare terminals like myself, however adding spades or plugs are extra) definitely put the 17g and 20g on your list to demo.

As an aside note, by having these speaker cables in my system I am able to hear and notate other discernable tweaks within my setup such as interconnects, etc.  Who would have thunk it?

Edit: I almost forgot to say that the RS7 Regular Drivers have hit a sweet spot for me as well, IMO they are better than the Vintage drivers by a fair margin and have the other nuances that I was looking for as far as an extended upper range while still preserving the excellent midrange, speed and detail that single drivers are known for.  I won't be getting rid of these any time soon ... well unless I trade up into one of his newer Outlaw designs with his top of the line Alnico Hemp Cones.