The only way to figure out what was best was to test them. For this I enlisted the help of audio guru Brent Butterworth and headphone reviewer Lauren Dragan. Both Brent and Lauren are seasoned reviewers who have tested a variety of audio products over the years.

Unsolicited by me, their opinions on speaker cable were similar to mine.

So I wouldn’t be biased, Brent cut two 10-foot lengths of each cable, labeling them with letters (so Lauren and I, at least, wouldn’t know which brand was which). We started with high-end gear but, to remove the gear from the equation, we switched in inexpensive speakers at the end of the test. Our gear included:

Krell's S-300i integrated amp

Krell's Resolution One speakers

Entech's Number Cruncher 205.2 DAC

Panasonic's DMP-BDT350 BD player (just used as a CD transport)

At the end of our test, we swapped in Hsu Research's HB-1 Mk2 speakers

For our first round of testing, we pitted all the 14 and 16 gauge cables against each other. This test was to see if we could hear a difference between the different brands of these similar thickness cables. While Lauren and I listened, Brent swapped the cables. Then I switched to Lauren’s seat, and she switched the cables for Brent and me. Music clips were short, so we could focus on specific sections.

To say the differences were subtle would be an overstatement. We are experienced audio reviewers, and this was really high-end gear, and we had a difficult time picking out differences. This isn’t to say they sounded the same, we each had cables we liked better than others... but our rankings couldn’t have been more different. So different, in fact, I’d call them random. There was no clear winner. Worse, there was no clear result.

For our next test, I selected one of the cables I liked from the first round, and we put that against the Monoprice 2747 12 gauge. This was to see if the move to a thicker gauge made an audible difference.

Interestingly, after our murky results from the first round, the difference between the 14 gauge and the 12 gauge was not only noticeable, it was definitive. Though the difference was still subtle, a difference was noticeable and repeatable across different music selections and seating positions. The 2747 sounded slightly fuller, like there was more heft to the sound. By comparison, the 14 gauge seemed thinner. Remember, this was done blind; we didn’t know which brand/gauge was which. We could, though, repeatedly pick out which cable sounded better and have that pick consistently be the same cable. This was the only result so far that we were confident in.

Next, we compared the Monoprice 2747 to the Pyle PSC1250. This test was similar to our first test, in that it was the same thickness of wire but different brands. The result was less apparent than the result from 14 vs. 12 gauge test, but there was still a noticeable difference. The Monoprice sounded a little more open and slightly richer.

For one final test, we swapped in the $320/pair Hsu Research HB-1 Mk2 bookshelf speakers. This was to see if we heard a difference on inexpensive speakers, and to see if different cables sounded better on these speakers than those that sounded good on the Krells.

Since the difference between the 14 and 12 gauge wires was the most obvious difference, we re-did this test with the less expensive speakers. The difference was far less noticeable than with the big Krell speakers. We were fairly confident in our choice (not nearly as much as we had been with the other test), and that choice turned out to be... the 14 gauge. Defeat snatched from the hands of victory.

It would be easy to take from this that you should get cheap cable if you have inexpensive speakers, but that’s not the whole story.

This result is actually more interesting than it first appears. It would be easy to take from this that you should get cheap cable if you have inexpensive speakers, but that’s not the whole story. In fact, this result proved my original premise (annoyingly so): that different wire can sound different, because it’s slightly changing the electrical properties of the entire system. For whatever reason, with the Hsu speakers, the 14-gauge had a better result.

Should we have done another round of testing, and figured out what the best 14- or 16-gauge wire was for the Hsu? We could have, but to what end? That would just have just told us what was good for those speakers.

Yep, this is getting ugly.