Are silver coated cables a bunch of hype?

While I would tend to disagree with a blanket statement that "...silver [makes] no difference", there are a lot more factors in cable design than whether the copper is coated or not which affects what they sound like: cable geometry, conductors, networks, shielding, dielectric material and mechanical connections to name a few. IMO, everything is hyped to a certain degree - it's just the age-old sales ploy to get your attention. Only your ears will tell you if it's worth the scratch.

Since silver is a better conductor than copper, the silver plating causes any frequencies on the "skin" of the wire to travel better and faster than the frequencies in the "core" of the wire. Since it is well known that the "skin effect" is a result of high frequencies traveling on the "skin" of the wire, and low frequencies traveling in the core, adding silver plating to the "skin" of the wire will only make the "skin effect" worse than no plating. The high frequencies will travel better and faster, and arrive at the speaker before the low frequencies will, thereby "smearing" the coherence of the signal. The effect will be bright and brash, with added time-distortion, that IMO, will do nothing good for the system. I personally would not use it.

hmmm... Bear makes silver plate cables, and they sound awesome.

So far(only 20hrs. of break in)Twl's comments are unequivocally correct.CAPITOLE MK1 PRO SILWAY MKII INTO VTL MONOBLOCKS TT25'S INTO DECAPO I'S LATEST VERSION.QED CABLES SILVER ANNIVERSARY are quite bright but it may be singing a different song two hundred hrs out.The strong point of this system is the right down the middle between solid state and tube qualities I am experiencing.On ART GARFUNKELS album Breakaway the track Waters of March has a sibilance that wouldnt be so readily apparent in all copper cables esses and pees pop out and you can tell if a pop screen was used on most recordings more easily.It still comes down to horses for courses silver plate may work better or worse in your system...fetlocks vary.

Dennis, I never said that nobody would like silver-plated cables. I just stated their typical characteristics. Since different people have different systems, and have different needs, sometimes a bright cable is needed to offset some other deficiency in the system. Cables seem to be used as tone controls these days. I don't know if every system is coherent enough to show the time distortion they produce. Hence they may sound good on certain systems.