What is the purpose of

Your analogy is completely logical and TRUE. However, any steps taken to improve the system will benefit the end result. However, those benefits may not be fully manifested until everything has been "worked to death" and the system has been "tweaked whole hog".

Keep in mind that there are many proponents of "small gauge" wire and even remove larger wires to replace them with "hair fine" conductors. Like anything else, you can find people on both sides of the fence. There are even those that sit and walk on top of the fence. Sean

The point of buying obscenely expensive speaker cable and interconnects is keep the cable manufacturers in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed and to annoy your wife.

I am one of those "thin" wire people. There are also obscenely expensive IC's and speaker cables that use such thin wire and, of course, more reasonably priced ones. Even though I prefer thinner cable in general (the largest that I use, other than for power cords, is 26 gage in a single run) it is the sound of a cable that should be the issue (not how thick it is).

The primary purpose of large diameter wire, whether it be solid or bundled, is to have a low resistance level and therefore less power loss, especially on long runs.Since amps and spkrs. have short wiring inside, they don't need large wire. Resistance and loss % may be found on wire resistance tables on the net. You will find that for most audio spkr. applications(3meters), 20ga-22ga is within the low loss category for low-medium powered amps. I find small gauge solid core single conductor wire preferable because of its ability to transmit the signal in-phase without noticeable skin effect(treble freq's running at higher speed on the surface, bass running slower in the core). Anything larger than 20ga is subject to skin effect problems due to the depth of the skin effect phenomenon in copper. Less than 20ga., the entire wire is essentially skin effect. There is also little or no capacitance or inductance problems with this type of wire(correctly configured) compared to braided, litz, bundled wire which, in effect, create the very problems that they attempt to solve. Some say bass gets limited with small gauge wire, and I would agree if you go smaller than 26ga. on a typical spkr. run. And don't try to run your 1000 watt amp to clipping thru a 30ga wire run of 100 ft! Small gauge wire can act as a fuse when improperly used. However, the small wire types I mentioned will yield better overall sonic purity in high definition lower power systems and I would definitely try some out. Smaller can be better.