Wow! What a great thread, although it has taken me many hours to read all the posts and the attendant links.

I would like to give my two cents worth, only from a slightly different perspective. I have been involved with high-end car audio for many years and only ventured into home audio and home theatre relatively recently. Home and car audio are definitely linked in the way we all pursuit the "Holy Grail," but car audio has its own set of obstacles and challenges – especially when it comes to interconnect cables.

What has yet to be mentioned in any detail is the real, measurable advances that have been made over the years in general cable technology. It has only been a few years since "twisted pair" cables were first marketed for car audio, and they have made a huge impact as far as noise reduction and signal-to-noise ratio goes. Interconnect noise from RF and EMI can be a big problem in car audio. Not only in noisy older cars with lousy grounding, but also in newer cars with their myriad of computers and electrical components. I have experienced first hand how twisted pair interconnects (sometimes incorrectly referred to as "balanced") have had a major impact on the war against noise. I have also seen how the shielding of a cable can affect the noise floor of an audio system. I would also like to mention that some car audio cables are "directional" – not because of any audio properties, but because the shielding is connected to a "drain" wire at the source. By grounding only one end of the cable's shield, EMI and RF noise is more efficiently routed to ground. This, too, has had tangible results in car audio systems. I have yet to see any "directional" home audio cables that incorporate a shield drain wire (or any kind of lifted shield plane), so I am very skeptical. (To be fair, most home audio gear has a single ground plane for power and signal, whereby some car audio gear uses differential circuitry with separate power and signal grounds. This sometimes benefits from an interconnect with a separate ground shield.) I would never install, or recommend installing, anything but twisted pair interconnects with some sort of shielding in a car. Since I have seen how well this technology works in the mobile environment, these are also the only types of cables I would use in my home audio system.

Based on my experience installing and listening to many car audio systems, I would never buy a coaxial audio interconnect again. I have read that coaxial cable may be better for video and digital signals, but twisted pair interconnects are definitely the way to go for analog audio cables. I don't think the type of end connector, or "termination," has much to do with sound quality (within reason), but it does have a lot to do with the use and longevity of the whole cable assembly. An installation shop I used to work for made all their own interconnect cables with twisted pair Carol cable and cheap nickel-plated ends. The key to achieving excellent results was the good quality twisted pair wire and decent all-metal RCA ends. Twisted pair interconnects are pretty much the norm in car audio now, but I still see a few "high-end" home audio interconnects that use a coaxial design. Radio Shack cables may be as sonically good as more expensive cables, but unless they are a twisted pair design I would stay away! Also avoid plastic RCA ends as they tend to not be as robust as all-metal barrels. The RCA ends with a Teflon insulator (usually white in color) between the center tip and ground seem to be better built and stronger than the ends with cheaper circuit-board material (usually brown or tan in color) around the center tip. All it takes is an RCA connector falling apart on you when you pull it out to wish you spent the extra $5 on interconnects.

I have also been reading a lot about the newer Ohno casting technique that seems quite credible. Perhaps it's because these castings have cool pictures to demonstrate their superiority to lesser extrusions, but who wouldn't want fewer squiggly microscopic lines in their copper? I do believe that there is a measurable difference between oxygen free copper (OFC) and less-pure grades, so it's reasonable to believe that Ohno castings are even more superior (assuming the same grade of OFC is used) for use as an electrical conductor. There's also a lot of buzz about silver – solid silver core, silver coated copper, etc – but I haven't seen any test results comparing copper and silver. I guess I'll have to wait until there are some cool microscopic pictures of silver conductors with even less squiggly lines before I'm convinced.

Keep up the debate, and thanks to all for the honest opinions and great links.

- Jeromy