1. Jim Winey, the inventor of the Magneplaner, advised me years ago about the "three note" theory. Namely that if you are starting to evaluate something new and different, if you don't hear it in the first three notes, it is not there. I consider this to be great advice.
2. Regarding the MIT cable comparison. First of all the Salk and Van Alstine crew already had three days of listening to the equipment (and our cables, such as they are) in that environment and had a pretty good idea as to what things were sounding like there. Second, the MIT guys, who initiated the conversation, certainly should have had a good idea of the "audible clues" that they expected their cables to show up.
3. I suggest that a very simple speaker wire test would be as follows: Connect the cables to your pet amplifier and to a standard 8 ohm load bank. Feed 10 KHz square waves in at a reasonable level - maybe 5V peak out as to not kill your amplifier. Hook up one scope probe at the amp output, the other at the load bank. Look for any differences in the wave form at each end. There is a name for differences between input and output, its called "distortion". If you have the opportunity to try various cables, and or various amplifiers, you are going to see some very interesting various results.
If your pet cable when connected to your pet amplifier exhibits a significant difference in the results at each end of the cable, then please explain rationally how this makes things sound better. Assuming of course that all other things being equal, lower distortion is better.
Best regards,
Frank Van Alstine
P.S. I would suggest that distributed capacitance is by far the most important factor in speaker cable values (the lower the better). Note that a very high capacitance cable, connected to a load sensitive amplifier, can actually cause the amp to go into full bore oscillations and self destruct. Even a 24 gauge speaker wire won't do this much harm.
