No one actually knows how to lculate what speaker cable they need

Oh lovely! Another snake oil guru!

I’m no engineer, but even my sophomoric understanding tells me you’re explanation up there is clearly lacking in technical consideration and reflects a simplistic grasp on the variables at work.

B4icu,

Idiotic, poorly written quote.

There’s basically nothing to ask you, and I’m not going to stroke your ego by feigning respect for your lack of intelligence by posing an inquiry. Instead, I’m just gonna tell you what’s up.

Just making cables thicker only solves the problem of passing low frequency current. Making cables thicker does the exact opposite to higher frequencies due to inductance and skin effect. That’s why practically nobody uses conductors larger than 14g. If more conductor is required, you use multiple conductors.

Cables are VERY low impedance in the audio spectrum; certainly lower than the output impedance of the vast majority of amps out there. They’re virtually inconsequential to the damping factor of an amplifier.

I’m not sure what made you wake up one morning and think you invented the magic formula everybody else missed for 100 years, but I’m pretty sure you didn’t.

B4icu,

You’re genuinely clueless. I’ve built cables. The cables I’m listening to right now are made of 6 fabric insulated 16g conductors in a round braid. I built them to replace single 12g cables of exactly the same length. They sound dramatically different even though the 6 conductor cables are nominally a half wire gauge bigger. That half wire guage doesn’t account for the difference. The reduced induction and twice the surface area of the conductors does.
Whoever told you cables are an extension of the amp lied to you. Cables have inductance, capacitance, and impedance, just like a speaker, which makes them a load unto themselves, be it a relatively minor one. Anything beyond the output posts is a load.
Anybody claiming to build ideal cables for any particular amp, speaker, or listener’s taste is a liar. If you really did invent the formula for ideal speaker cables, the same formula would work for interconnects because a pre-amp driving an amp is nothing more than a source driving a load and the electrical considerations are exactly the same.
Thanks for the nonsensical snake oil pitch, but you make no sense, contradict well understood electrical theory and testing, and speak in semantic riddles that reflect no technical understanding.

b4icu,

No, really, you're totally clueless. 

Twisting and braiding wires doesn't create inductance, it reduces it. It's just a fact. Running wires straight and parallel increases inductance and crosstalk between conductors. Go rip apart a USB cable, SAS cable, Ethernet cable, HDMI cable, or practically any cable designed to carry signals at any sort of high speed with precision. The signal pairs are always twisted. Braiding is just a technique to uniformally twist all the conductors. No fancy magic there. 
ALL wires have impedance, inductance, and capacitance. We can know this because it's very measurable stuff.
The inductance of a conductor is directly related to it's thickness and dominates the transmission characteristics of the conductor at high frequencies giving rise to skin effect and in part dictates the impedance of the conductor according to frequency. Wire inductance is so easy to precisely measure we can accurately measure the power flowing through a wire using an inductive pick up. Most electricians have these tools in their toolbox. 
The capacitance is a result of the conductor being insulated, be it by air, plastic, cloth, paper, rubber, or whatever covers it. It's unavoidable if you intend to build practical cables for anything. 
The resistance of a speaker cable is almost irrelevant since we're not dealing in DC currents here. We're dealing with AC signals and impedance is the appropriate measure of resistance. If moving huge amounts of current to our speakers was the only consideration we'd all be wiring our speakers with jumper cables, but obviously we don't. 
You genuinely don't have a clue what you're talking about and it's obvious. This is stuff they teach in high school physics. You've got no business running around claiming you're any sort of expert on cables if you don't even know all wires have impedance, inductance, and capacitance. 
As for input transistors on power amps....
NO, they are absolutely NOT purely resistive loads. Even the best JFET small signal transistors have small capacitances at their gate that vary with frequency. That's why amplifier input impedance typically sinks as the frequency rises. Along with that, they have small inductance values, too. If you're dealing with an amp with a stupidly low input impedance like 10K ohm, you're dealing with an amp with BJT inputs. BJT inputs are current driven devices, not voltage driven devices, so interconnects with more current carrying capacity are in order. If your amp has JFET inputs like mine, with a 100K ohm input impedance, less current carrying capacity is required. In fact, you can use Litz wire for the IC on an amp like that very effectively. However, it's not recommended with high bandwidth amps because it can induce ringing in the amplifier because there isn't enough inductace to damp high frequency reflections up and down the line. 
Ya know, you could just look this stuff up and learn before coming here and saying silly things like you do. Unless you've got some sort of documentation or formula to back up what you're talking about, I'm calling BS and snake oil on you. 

B4icu 

How about you post the formula you supposedly invented? I don't think you have one that could withstand any scrutiny. 

B4icu,

You talk like having an insanely high damping factor is a good thing! Do you know why amps with very high damping factors are lousy amps? Because they ring like freaking bells when connected to a reactive load. 

You have no clue what you're talking about. 

500 is on the higher side. It usually suggests complicated feedback and gobs of it. That, or piles of parallel output devices. Or both. I'm not saying it's bad or impossible to do. People have built amps with damping factors well over 1000. And people have bought them. But beyond about 50 or so, the benefits begin to diminish, and out past a few hundred you're needing to take care to avoid oscillation and ringing. 

b4icu,

Guess I’ll school you some more if that’s what you want.

If you’re using speakers with benign phase angles and unabusive impedance fluctuations, you hardly need a damping factor at all. Having some insanely high damping factor doesn’t add anything! A factor of 15 or 20 is plenty sufficient and there’s plenty of amps that prove that, chief among them the First Watt J2 and many SET amps.

All gain devices become more nonlinear as they swing larger voltage. There’s a good argument to be made for speakers designed to be benign and efficient, but a more reactive speaker has advantages as well, such as utilizing current draw and phase angles to bully the drivers into behaving. Even with the most reactive speakers a damping factor more than 200 is pretty much pointless. How much do you want the amp to misbehave in response to the speaker? That’s why McIntosh likes their output transformers on their SS amps. They give a DF around 50 or so and keep the gain devices behaving like proper voltage sources.

With pairs of MOSFETs, JFETs, or BJTs as output devices you’re going to get a DF around 50. Double the number and you get about double the damping factor. At some point you’re not well optimized by using more gain devices and for the vast majority of amps that’s around 2 or 3 pairs for mid power amps. So if you want more damping factor you’re adding negative feedback. You can add 95% of the open loop gain and get a VERY high damping factor. 1500 or so is totally possible with enough feedback. It’s very easy to do. Nobody does it because it sounds like hell. We learned a long time ago damping factor isn’t the end all. The techniques to get a very high damping factor always contribute to more complex distortion. Since damping factor primarily effects bass, the trade off tends to be more controlled bass at the expense of brighter, more grating treble because of the more complex distortion.

You speak as though impedance is the only act in town. You don’t seem to grasp that a damping factor describes the inductance and capacitance of the circuit. When an amplifier damps an uncontrolled woofer, it’s acting as a giant inductor. All these electrical characteristics play an equal role, and you don’t seem to grab that. Nobody should take you seriously.

b4icu,

I'm just demonstrating how poorly you understand what you claim to be an expert on. You're over there claiming one particular spec is the end all of describing amplifier behavior and you're prescribing ridiculous solutions based on it. I just want to be sure nobody takes you seriously or considers you an expert on audio. 

What a few suckers say about your nonsense hardly constitutes proof. There's people around here buying spots and clocks and swearing they make a difference. You said you had a perfect calculation. You don't. You can't prove you do. 

B4icu, 
If you think any two cables with the same resistance sound the same, you're truly a fool. It's entirely possible for two cables with identical resistance to have very different impedance characteristics. Every single time you post you expose yourself as more and more ignorant. 

I'd put my home brew cables against yours any day of the week. You don't know enough to build a good cable. 

The OP is clueless and doesn't even know the proper technical terminology. And he flags any post that challenges him or proves him wrong. 

It's just obvious you don't know what you're talking about. I feel bad for those who can't see that. They clearly don't know what good sound really sounds like. 

b4icu, 
Maybe some people don't care for some guy showing up on the scene and making ridiculous claims to some esoteric knowledge they clearly don't have. Guys like you, and the people you impress, out there using jumper cables for their speakers, look pretty silly to those of us who have a clue. You're ideas are silly in their own right, but you yourself are silly for claiming you've discovered the knowledge nobody else has in over 100 years of electrical engineering. I don't know why, but every few months one of your type comes out of the woodwork with some gimmick. Yours is jumper cables. There was a guy here banging on about "infra-bass", or something like that, whatever that is. Another guy went nuts about his "holographic amplifier" that "cloned" the recording venue. I think he was the same guy who claimed to have invented a 4th mode to operate transistors in. I'm sure there will be another fuse thread before too long. 

B4icu,

Why do you keep clinging to science? There is no science to your claims. You’ve presented no scientific proof. Where’s your formal theory or formula? You can’t cling to science while exempting yourself from it’s rigors.

A 10KHz signal is only using about 1/16th of an inch of a wire’s cross section. Anything thicker than that just produces more and more inductive impedance as the wire gets thicker and as the frequency increases. A 15KHz signal through a 6 foot 0g cable is seeing a massive amount of impedance. That’s stuff you can look up the numbers and actually model. That’s science. That’s not good for speaker cables. This is very elementary stuff.

Sorry, pal, but your numbers are off by about 3 orders of magnitude. Nobody is using 200mm long speaker cables. More like 2000mm. That puts the final equation out around .25 ohm. 

Why do you think some people use Litz wire for interconnects? It's because the inductance of solid wire presents audiblo significant impedance to high frequencies. That's why I can't use Litz wire with my amp. It doesn't present the impedance required to damp the oscillation that can result from a bad ground, and with 1MHz full power bandwidth, it WILL amplify all kinds of things. If your misinterpretation were correct, it wouldn't make any difference. 

Are you using 0g XLR cables? NO. Are CAT6 ethernet cables built from 8g? NO. Are USB cables as big as my arm? NO. You’re proving my point, not refuting it! You can jam crazy high alternating voltages down a thin conductor with negligible impedance, and it’s generally preferable to do so. That’s why utility companies do it. 

As for your calculator... Learn how to read it. You’re looking at the wrong value. You’re quoting the skin depth impedance, not the full diameter impedance. It’s pretty freaking obvious. That’s why the number you quote is such a small figure and hardly changes with length.

Read this: https://www.passdiy.com/project/articles/speaker-cables

Nelson Pass did the measurements and they’re not even close to the stuff you’re saying. I’m going to trust his actual measurements a little bit more than your misinterpreted internet calculator speculation.

b4icu,

Since you flagged my last post, I'll say it again...

Please, by all means, do school us on how Nelson Pass went down the wrong path. 

I have no interest in answering to you. I've proven through measurements that you've got no idea what you're talking about. Nelson's measurements agree with the numbers I've been telling you. You're aren't even in the ballpark. You're wrong. You have no secret formula. The proof is out there. I put it there. Everyone sees it. Just stop with this. You're not more credible than Nelson Pass. 

C'mon, b4icu... Don't bail on us now. We're waiting with baited breath to learn how Nelson Pass went down the wrong path. 

You have no concept. I proved you completely wrong. You can't read a calculator. You don't know what you're talking about. And the people who do think you have any clue might want to compare your nonsense claims to the actual measurements somebody took. 

I don't need to go head to head with you on concept or theory because the measurements have been done that prove you're concepts and theories are completely wrong. Trust me... The vast majority of folks here think you're a snake oiler. No proof. Just a lot of word salad and bad understanding. 

Let me sum up you're arguments and my responses...

You claim a new way to calculate appropriate speaker cable. 

I ask you how; what's the formula?

You state a theory and refer to the evidence of the results of an impedance calculation. 

I looked at your evidence and found an error in your interpretation. 

You demanded evidence to support my claim that you're wrong. 

I cited and linked to an article by Nelson Pass, which you read, that agreed with the claim I was making. 

Repeatedly you've presented anecdotal evidence and demanded it be held to the same level of respect as actual measurements. 

Now you demand I engage you on the level of anecdotal evidence as if that's equal to quantitative evidence of your quantitative claim. 

Then you demand I replicate the quantitative evidence because you refuse to explain the difference between your measurements and those of Nelson Pass, which you've already looked at. 

The anecdotal evidence that people say it sounds good doesn't support your scientific claim that your formula is the cause. Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence of quantitative scientific statements such as you've made. When you state you've developed a calculation, you've left the realm of the subjective and entered the objective. Therefore, subjective evidence is irrelevant. 

I never said I did the measurements at any point. I said the measurements have been done and they don't agree with your claims and then I cited and linked to them. You didn't do the measurements either! How can you ask someone to verify measurements you haven't even done yourself? Making measurements of these kinds is a somewhat technical challenge requiring some somewhat expensive gear and calibrated apparatus. I don't have that gear yet.

As for the theory which your secret formula supports...
It must be wrong. It has to be wrong because your understanding of the phenomenon doesn't match measurements. The values you claim are in error by orders of magnitude as proven by mathematical calculation and the verification of that math by measurements. Nobody needs to know your formula to prove its wrong because the results you claim from it are wrong. And that's why I know you've never done the measurements yourself. 

By the way... We're still waiting for you to explain to us just how Nelson Pass went down the wrong path. The least you could do would be to explain why his measurements are wrong. 

Who's the "boss of the cable industry"? Why would anyone want to talk to you when you can't defend your theory from observed measurements that prove it wrong? You had all kinds of fight when you thought anecdotal evidence was your ace in the hole. C'mon, man! Tell us how the math is wrong and how Nelson Pass doesn't know what he's talking about or measuring. Stop trying to appeal to the imaginary "boss of the cable industry" for credibility. You don't get to be the "boss of the cable industry" by recruiting guys who can't make their ideas agree with math or measurements. 

Hmmmm.... The boss of the cable industry doesn't seem to have arrived. I don't understand. I was hoping he'd show up and tell us how Nelson Pass doesn't know what he's talking about or measuring. Guess I'll stop holding my breath.