Only you expensive cable owners, is this real?

Yes, use your audio site to push a conspiracy book about the military. Real PROs always do that you know....Keep the look fresh..No flies on his jam.. I tell you.

"Also I tried the speaker wires and they were not quite as good sounding as my existing Zu event cables."

Thanks, rickraymond59. You get the "set my mind at ease" prize. I'll keep my Zu Libtecs and stop wondering about the Mapleshades. By the way, they replaced some Auvio 12G Premium wire that was 99%OCC of which half was silver coated. I strained to hear the difference when I upgraded to the Libtecs with no burn in. Did I go back and compare again after 400 hours? Nah!

It seems the trend in high end audio is ridiculously higher and higher prices combined with outlandish and bogus claims - the Mapleshade design approach to speaker cable, IMO, is sound and the price seems reasonable.
I don’t have any of the Mapleshade cables in my system, but the speaker cables I have and have been using in my main system for the past eight years, are similarly built, that is - a double run of single strand high grade copper conductors, ea. run with a thin coating of polyethylene insulation, protected with a thin textile sleeve. No Graphene, no moon dust, no layers and layers of fancy bogus shielding, just well designed and well built, using quality materials. While not cheep, at just over $1K for a 8’ double run pair, certainly not the many thousands $$$ being ask for some of the crazy, ill designed cables out there and sound better than any other cables, at any price, I’ve had or heard.
While I would not exchange my cables for any others out there, at any price, because they are no longer available, if I ever did have to purchase another set of cables, the Mapleshades, as well as a few other sensibly designed cables, would be high on my list of possible choices. Just my 2 cents....Jim

Oxygen free copper and a well insulated covering is all you (should) need. The real trick is getting the right TERMINATIONS for your particular component(s). Since 5-way binding posts are "too old fashioned" you need banana plugs sometimes, or flexible ends when using winged-input connectors on amplifiers (a real pain IMO). Spade lugs sometimes need to be angled 45 degrees instead of straight. RCA jacks can be too tight or too loose. Heavy cables can drag your component off the shelf. Of course you may need adapters to convert RCA's to XLR's or the other way around. AC plugs can be too heavy even for a good hospital-grade outlet, or too tight. Then there are "impedance" questions only the more educated amongst us really understand. I love my music system, but there are parts of the journey I could have done without, like getting the Bloody cables I bought to fit "nicely" between one box and the other box. More than once I had to get a cable re-terminated. Another time the Belden cable that came with the component worked better than the after-market power cord I purchased. Cables should not be a major problem for the most part when evaluating what your system is capable of. IMHO. And speaking of exotic materials for shelves, footers, etc.
GOOD MDF used properly is still an excellent material and is easy to work with for many projects and applications. Maple is nice too, but probably should be used to make guitars and the like.  

Actually the really good Mapleshade interconnect cables have a conductor that’s only 54 gauge copper. I just saw that someone mentioned the Omega Mikro a little while back. One assumes that’s not the one you based your cables on. One also assumes you would probably call that Mapleshade cable snake oil or moon dust since 54 ga is about the diameter of a human hair.

While someone is compiling ing desired attributes of cables he might consider purity of the metal, silver vs copper, the influence of adding gold to the metal, the thickness of the conductor, stranded vs solid core, the design of the dielectric and directionality of the conductor.