Anyone who can hear differences in hookup wire, copper, silver, enamelled, tefloned, whatever - has hearing powers that are exceedingly great.
I think it's more important to keep lengths short, even, and to make good connections.
I currently use the Chimera wire because I have some. I formerly used Cardas and a few others, even Cat 5e.
There is a tremendous amount of words devoted to this subject in forums, websites, and the like. Hard to filter the wheat from the chaff too. But with lengths of only a few inches, I don't think it all matters too much.
I agree. I say quite deliberately these things are my subjective impressions. When I used to work in a recording studio we AB'd a lot of DACs, mics etc but never cables. It was too hard to rig up. I can't reliably pick the difference between the thin wires that I use, regardless of composition. Mind you, interconnects are a different story, but that has more to do with the way they load and interact the output they are connected to.
All I can say is that degradation from multi-stranded wire, thick wire and poor dielectrics/insulators is easily measureable, and often audible. This tells you what to
avoid. However, it doesn't tell you what you
should use. This leads to subjective preference as the guiding principle, and this is rearely tested "scientifically." I am more than willing (I've seen it happen!) to say that people can hear things that can't be measured, or rather we don't know
how to measure, but the point is there are scientific methods for measurement of subjective experience of this kind. It can be done. Two examples off the top of my head are speaker manufacturers like B+W who do blind panel preference tests, and Larry's blind A/B shoot out at AKSAFest in which only one person did better than chance at picking between the two sources.
Given that many (but not all!) of these tweaks are cheap, why not try them all. Better yet, maybe Larry could put up his design for the random AB tester and people can do their own blind listening tests replete with Z-score significance level. If we did that carefully, we could almost certainly get an article published about it!
Back to wire. Incidentally the only voltage I could read off a moving strand of Kynar WWW came when one end wasn't terminated and was wagged over the test rig ground plane. I'm pretty sure that isn't a piezo-electric effect
Mal is right, Kynar can be made piezo or pyro electric if manufactured that way, but the WWW I have doesn't seem to exhibit any apalling properties.
Another 2c worth.
T.
