I recently switched out my 10 AWG Blue Jeans cable for some fancy, braided terminated 9 AWG cables from a local manufacturer. These new garden hosed sized cables are really, really nice to look at, and seem very well constructed but after a couple of weeks of listening on my Mac system, I realized that the BJ cables actually sounded better. The new cables seemed to diminish the soundstage and balance of the system. They were a little more detailed sounding, (bright perhaps?), but the BJ cables sound much, much smoother with a much wider soundstage. Just goes to show that you don't have to spend a lot of money on cables for your system to sound good.
Interesting Dave. I had the same experience with trying out a very very expensive pair of PS Audio cables. They two were very fancy gardenhose cables that went for $800/pair back in 2000. I put them against my KimberKable 4PR with marginal to no improvement.