Inside the $800 Audio Cable

those 'evocative textures' are mostly artifacts of capacitance. your regular 'monster cable' is made of a kind of 'dirty' wire -- wire with lots of copper cristals, granules, chunks of copper, from the melting and cooling process. in the 80's an hitachi engineer experimented with mercury in a tube, electrical connections at either end, and heard a much clearer musical sound than from the high-grade copper wires they were marketing. extrapolating that, he had wire drawn that formed a single copper crystal. when electricity passes through this kind of wire it doesn't have to excite many single crystals -- which means that it doesn't get released in a rush, like a water-hose filling and breaking a balloon - gushes of electrons, making her voice harsh when she sings certain notes. that's the nuance. it's not on the disc.

what the marketers do with this kind of wire is something else though. but, the purity of the copper and the way it's formed do make a world of difference. i like to hear the rest of the orchestra behind marlyn horne, and hear the separate voices of the chorus backing her. that's what it's like. about a hundred dollars for connecting cables -- one half meter.