lol @ my dad who is a huge audiophile and ran his own business for a long time.
Anyway the wire thing has been going around for years and, yes, it is 99.9% bullshit. People who are convinced to spend $$$$ on cables hear a difference, of course, but so would you if you just dropped $10k on a pair of wires. Either that or you would have to admit you were a fool. It is called the Placebo effect in medicine where a certain number of people feel an improvement after taking sugar pills. That is how Monster cable got its start but naturally successors have done them better on the bullshit scale. Monster speaker cables sounded better because they were heavier gauge than people usually used, not because they were made of silver or oxygen free copper or litz wire or some such crap. About the only thing that has a real benefit are gold plated connectors and that only because gold does not corrode and introduce a non linear resistance component over time.
I think the most egregious example I ever saw was an advertisement for a $185 line cord with silver pronged plug to replace the AC power cord on your amplifier. The claims were ridiculous and they had a bunch of testimonials. Of course it doesn’t take a PhD to reason that a 3 foot piece of “Magic” wire is insignificant when you consider the 100 feet of plain old 14/2 Romex going from the outlet to the breaker panel, or the aluminium 000 AWG service cable to the transformer, or the plain old garden variety transformer on the pole or the 200 miles of junk wire back to the generating plant. Barnum was correct that there is a sucker born every minute. Naturally Audio stores and places like Best Buy love this stuff because while competition may force them to drop their pants on the profit margin on the electronics, they sell the cables for 5 to 10X what they pay for them and since everybody is in on the game NOBODY discounts the cables.