I can tell you from experiance that it wasn't just the gauge of the wire that makes the difference though you probably upped the amount of copper or silver when you went to the higher end cables. You can't expect to hear the same quality of sound from mainstream consumer equipment and state of the art equipment. Notice I didn't qualify by price. There is really good equipment available for a fraction of the prices you mentioned. What equipment are you talking about? Those prices are really up there. You should get a very high level of audio performsnce in a 50k system unless 40k is going into the video