I'd like to share a story with you about the war between 'esoteric' cable manufacturers and scinetists / engineers.

About 15 years ago, an audio magazine (with a very large circulation) comissioned an article from one of the faculty members of one of the larger universities here in the 'states. This article was written by said professor (if memory serves, he holds a Ph.D in Electrical or perhaps Mechanical engineering...possibly Mathematics...but I digress) who himself was rater adept in signal processing techniques and theory.

I remember reading the article at the time - again, being in school and woprking on my EE degree...and feeling 'at one' with it (it was the start of my Senior year when this article was published - and so all of this felt so 'current' and close to home...)

Anyway, the heart and soul of the article was that said professor / author applied the principles of transmission line mathematics to things like unbalanced (RCA) cables ('interconnects' as it were) as well as speaker wire. He looked at wire in terms of the properties that given its ability to send a signal, unadulterated, through it - things like resistance, capacitance, inductance and so on. I believe that not only did he consider the normal audio bandwidth, but even went a bit further bandwidth-wise 'just to see' if the terms bantied about (i.e. skin effect et al) were of significance in the audio band or even above.

After sopme very nice and (again, at the time) highly topical mathematics to lay it bare so to speak, his conculsions (paraphrasing) were that there was nothing in the formulae used to evaluate the design of transmission lines (i.e. fundamentally applicable mathematics universally acceptaed in the E.E. world) that would suggest that cables (again...excepting the 'obvious' blunders like using no shield (on a signal cable) or using #30 wire (speaker wire)) made one iota of difference. I don;t think he had any listening studies (paired comparison et al) and I think that ABX was just coming into play in those days...but again...this is from memory.

Anyway, I remember one suggestion in particular - he basically said that if you have long runs between the amplifier and the speaker, stick with the lowest (i.e. fattest) practical gauge (I think he suggested #12 at the most), but the best thing you could do would be to move the amplifier as close to the speaker as possible (even though this was a general statement as with the amplifier very close to the speaker, the gauge (any sane guage) will have little effect). The next step was purchasing / fabricating something to produce a low-Z balanced send from the preamp's high-Z unbalanced - if it wasn't so equipped - out and a low-Z differential input at the amplifier (which would then turn out a signle-ended high-Z signal to feed the amplifier locally). All in all a very sane approach at getting the low level signal from pre-amp to amplifier with the lowest noise floor, and minimizing the length of the speaker cables used in the process.

After this story hit the newsstands an interesting thing happened. The magazine in question was beseiged by their advertisers, many of whom sold 'specialty' cables that appeared in the back of the magazine on a regular basis. Now...this is second-hand, but as it was told to me, said advertisers, bemused by this article, essentially threatened to pull all of their advertising if a retraction was not published. What was interesting to me was that not one of them offered to provide any measurements that would assert their claims of their products' superiority. Indeed, not to change horses mid-stream, but the 'esoterics' that do make cable often say (or rather...hide behind in my opinion) that to reveal the results of their analyses would be giving away proprietary details, and thus, said documentation cannot be provided.

Again...I have paraphrased much...and I have not revealed the names and dates, but believe me, this is exactly how I remember the story having gone down.

Later on, I had the opportunity to meet said professor as I had the chance to attend some of his lectures as well as discuss the article with him. He was pretty amused by the whole thing as I recall...he never knew that such a 'straight ahead' matter could cause such heated debate in the audio community.