I recently visited my local audiophile shop as I was in the market for two new surround speakers. Naturally, to hook speakers up to your amplifier you need speaker wires. And that is when the can of worms appeared.

See, there is this long standing war going on in the audiophile world about speaker cables. Some people treat it like it were pixie dust or unicorn horns or religion. Some say spending up to 20% the cost of your system on interconnects are justifiable. A mid range system can easily cost $3000 for the receiver, $3500 for the TV, $500 for the Blu-Ray player and about $4000 for the speakers. That totals $11000. 20% of that is $2200 - for cables... To hook that up you will need two cat2 HDMI cables, one RCA cable (subwoofer) and 5 speaker cables assuming a 5.1 setup. It is possible to spend $30 on two HDMI cables, $40 for a fancy subwoofer cable and $70 for 100ft of AWG14 speaker wires for a total of $140. That is a far cry from $2200. The question is - do these audiophiles have a point? Does it make a difference dropping that much money on interconnects?

This all started when my hi-fi shop sales rep reminded me that the speaker wire I am purchasing is directional and has to be installed the right way round. Now I must first state that the only reason I buy from this shop is because of this guy. He is really incredibly good - never tries to be the sales guy and push expensive stuff on you when you do not need it. But mentioning wire directionality made warning signs go off in my head. As electrical engineer I know a thing or two about electricity. I mean, as engineer you start out learning about magnetic flux, Bessel functions, the difference between face centered and body centered cubic crystals, that holes can flow just like electrons in semiconductors and so on. So mentioning directionality in a wire that will be carrying alternating current exclusively made me concerned.

I decided to spend a little time investigating some of these opinions on why high end speaker cables are justified and found that... Well, you can read for yourself here.