Cable Lover:
It is not established that cables make a difference.
IMHO the very best thing you could do is start thinking about what the professionals do. Why is it that at hi-fi shows Harbeth, who make speakers for the BBC, use 79 strand speaker cable at £1.20/m? (They don't bi-wire either despite the facility being available, and leave the brass links in that are so despised by audiophiles). Why do PMC use Van Damme cable? They clearly want to show their products at their best, so why use "cheap" cable?
It is not established that the human ear can hear the differences between cables, that's true. It's hard to prove these kind of things. If you trust blind listening tests, you'll have to accept that usually the listeners cannot identify cables consistently. But it is also true that, in those same bling listening tests, most listeners cannot guess consistently which CDP or even which amp is playing!! And I suppose we all agree CDPs and amps do sound different.
As for measured differences in cables, these do exist. They all measure different regarding inductance, capacitance and resistance. There is even a guy who measured the waveforms transmited by different cables, and the waveforms were different from cable to cable (the info is somewhere in the net, if you want to check it).
So, I think even the most technical guy has to agree they do measure different. But it is hard to determine if the human ear can feel those differences.
But when you try a silver coated cable with bright speakers for some weeks, and your ears are bleeding, and you cannot bear it; you swap for a copper cable (even a bulk cable), and the HF edge is gone, and you feel a relief...you cannot doubt they sound different.
I systematically hear differences everytime I swap cables; they all have their sonic signatures. And I'm not only talking about frequency balance. They have their own way of handling dynamics, stereo imaging, etc. Some cables have a black background; others sound "light brown" (similar to the colour that paper cones have), etc.
As for what you say about speaker manufacturers:
- Tannoy uses VDH cabling inside their speakers.
- Epos uses DNM
- AE uses relatively expensive silver cables inside the AE1 MKIII
- MBL shows they ultra high end equipment with top of the line Transparent cables (ultra expensive)
Also, many high-end recording studios do use brand cables.