Micheal B:
I was cleaning my bookshelves, and came across a bunch of "Audio" mags from 1982. In the back pages, there are lots of little ads for various "Snake Oil" devices. Not one of those companies is still in business. (Except "Monster"- but that's another story...)
It's simple- they spring up, chase a fad until the market is gutted or wises up, and they fold. Market Forces at work. Nothing new here.
If a person is asking a question based on misinformation or downright lies, and isn't challenged on those assumptions, and other forum members then take that same information as truth because everybody here seems to agree with it, then we are all guilty of perpetuating fraud.
To debunk the original post:
"(high freqs like to travel near the surface of the wire low in the center)"
A distorted view of the "skin" effect. I recently addressed it in another post. Applicable at RF, (I've lived with it, measured it accurately and can model it, for years.), this effect is negligible at audio frequencies. You still see it taken as gospel here. Bad, Bad pseudoscience!
"while I understand the theory of the "wire network" construction"
Obviously, he does not. Network theory has many facets, from software, ("ethernet crashes"), to hardware, (Impedance matching of AC power networks over "The Grid").
His question can be modeled easily with Kirchoff's laws to show that, all else being equal, multistrand cable is no different from single strand.
"So what is causing the demand ?" You ask?
Ignorance. Not stupidity- most people here are quite bright. They just lack the basic information. And a certain amount of pride is involved as well. Somebody who spends $500 on a power cord just cannot admit that there isn't a difference- they _honestly_ believe that the "sound" is better.
Having followed the Snake Oil trail for quite a few years, here's a few that really did pan out:
Massive plinths for turntables and tube amplifiers to prevent microphonics.
Regular degaussing of non-ferrite tape heads.
Time-alignment of speaker drivers.
Gold-plated connectors.
Binaural sound.
These all had scoffers- especially Binaural sound, which depended on close attention being paid to absolute phase and headphone-ear frequency matching, in order to provide what experimentalists call 4-Pi reproduction from two point sources. Psychoacoustics did eventually catch up.