Wayne/Cranky,
Here is a quote from just one industry source of wires/interconnects I use, and technical - be it as it may.
"It is said, wire is just wire. In reality, a high-end audio cable must balance resistance, capacitance, inductance, conductance, velocity of propagation, RF radiation and absorption, mechanical resonance, strand interaction, hysteresis, high filtering, wavy serial impedance and reflections, electrical resonance, dissipation factors, envelope delay, phase distortion, harmonic distortion, piezoelectric effects, hall effect, field effect, voltage and current tracking, thermoelectric phenomenon effects, structural return loss, skin effect, corrosion, cross-talk, bridge-tap and the interaction of these and a hundred other things"
"The sound produced by any stereo system depends on the purity of the audio signal it produces. When the cable linking all components together imparts its own sound, the audio signal is corrupted."
In english, some wire and interconnects just sound better than others... To me, there is a difference in some, and you may not need to spend much to get 97% of what you might be looking for. The price goes waaaay up for the extra 3-5%. It has to do with the quality and type of wire, how it is put together, shielded, filtered, wrapped - etc. I would say matching your components and the room itself is key, then looking at good interconnects. The benefit seems to only reveal itself enough to make it worth it on the higher quality well-matched amps/sources, in my own personal experiences...
