luckylion100 said:
and then flogging them as high quality speaker cable... ******, why didn't I think of that?! ;-)
This was the mid-late 80s and it was Australia.
Mathew had a shop in Bondi Junction and needed someone to help out while he was involved in other 'projects'. At that time the 'best' cable was perceived by the industry to be a Monster Cable product selling at A$9.99 per meter.
The locally produced regular 19amp twin and earth cost little more than that for a 50m drum. We stripped the cable saving the bare earth for scrap and used the red and black cores as speaker cable. There was science involved, we calculated that the optimum impedance could be obtained by modifying the inductance with a half twist every 20 cm or so, rather along the lines of Chord Co rumour.
However this looked pretty untidy so I sugested the Black and Decker approach to give a tighter spiral and a much better look. Mathew had a story that the cable he used came from Australian mined copper that was, after refining, unusually pure and this is why it sounded so good. I have no idea if the story was true or not.
Anyway, we had no problem demonstrating the superiority of this cable over the Monster, pretty much everyone heard the difference and most were happy to pay the A$19.99 per meter that we charged.