I was born an obsessive reader and a compulsive tinkerer. During the ’60s, I subscribed to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Hot Rod, Car Craft, Motor Trend, Road & Track, and (of course) Stereo Review and High Fidelity. Every one of those magazines presented articles discussing the importance of upgrading stock wiring to better-quality “premium” wires, citing improved electrical performance and greater reliability.
That was a time when drag-racing cars began using thick, “fuel- and flame-resistant,” silicone-sheathed wires between magnetos and spark plugs. Every street rodder who could afford it sported a Mallory Super Mag distributor. Exposed engines were the norm, and a Tach-Drive Super Mag with expensive, bright-colored spark-plug wires was a status symbol on street rods. Even the humble act of replacing the black-rubber–sheathed wires on your daily driver with the five-times-more-expensive bright-red silicone-sheathed Mallory or cadmium-yellow Accel cables proved you were serious about high performance. Likewise, at home with your hi-fi, abandoning lamp cord and rolling your own better-quality speaker cables proved you were serious about high-quality sound.
Magazine articles focused on wire gauge, conductor purity, strand geometry, and dielectric material. I remember reading, in an Audio Engineering Society article on telephone communications, that the difference between conductor and dielectric time constants was an important factor for speech transmission. Cable science was a hot topic during the Summer of Love.
Hi-fi magazines encouraged readers to experiment with heavier-gauge, high-purity copper wires in either solid-core or multistrand configurations. They advised enthusiasts that speaker wires affected sound character differently when deployed in parallel (as in lamp cord) than in twisted pairs. During my first year in college, I DIY-tried every such speaker-wire configuration. After two semesters of experimentation, I determined that loosely twisted
