I think that’s the point, that according to audiophile “lore” higher quality materials enhance the sound, thus mud should sound bad under that assumption, but they (apparently) can’t tell the difference.

I'm not sure it's a really great experiment though?

Outside of the hyper-crazies, no one is really stating that a 6-12 inches of conductor is going to make a giant difference in audio quality. Yes, I'm aware of the super-premium-gold-plated-platinum-encrusted 12" audio patch cords available. But almost no one really makes serious arguments those do anything.

I don't think running a 50ft banana is going to have similar performance to a 50ft properly-sized copper conductor though.

Where you get into the "debate" is the difference between buying a spool of 12ga stranded copper wiring from Home Depot, or buying the same thing only with de-oxygenated or whatever silliness some audiophile brand is selling for 10x the cost.

There are levels to things. I imagine copper speaker wire to be essentially fungible. Just size it to your length of run and max power needs. Calculate the total resistance for your wire run and done/done. All professional level sound installations for venues and what-have-you do this already.

This sort of test just seems to prove nothing in either direction other than provide bait for folks to point and laugh (or defend) in comment sections. Consider me baited, I suppose!

It depends on the experiment done… You need every intermediate point between the wires to be low distortion too. As in, audiophiles cannot distinguish between distortion and distortion+distortion is not really an interesting result.

You need source, digital to analog conversion, pre-amp, amp, speakers to have low distortion too, and you need the room to be appropriately treated too. I didn’t look at whether they did all that but I seriously doubt they did.