Why not just hook the things to an audio analyzer? If you think you are a better instrument than an Audio Precision . . . well . . .
Yeah, well. I know there is a whole bunch of awful sounding gear that looks good when measured on a test bench. They don't call it benchmarketing for nothing.
You have to know what to test. There are a lot of things you can test for that don't show up in standard specifications. There is also plenty of good sounding gear that has nonlinearities that show up easily in testing. People seem to like the tinybox transformers; they are highly nonlinear devices. But I can show that pretty easily on the test gear.
When I reduce that to a specification, it will say something like 0.3% THD at 1kHz at 0dBV. That's all the standard specification calls for. But I try to go beyond that and list the 100Hz spec as well (3%), and if somebody asks the amount of each harmonic (mostly third, some fifth, in case you are wondering).
By comparison, you could clip an ADC exactly to the same THD spec and it would sound terrible because of the high-order distortion content.
Again, all easily visible on an audio analyzer. You have to know what to test for.
Anyway, we are talking about cables, not amplifiers. The job of a cable is pretty simple to quantify; send the same signal (a couple of high-quality square waves maybe) to a two-channel amp, one terminated with a specified load directly at the amp (no cable), the other terminated at the end of the cable. Compare on a dual-trace scope. Repeat with channels swapped if you are fastidious.
I am not saying these cables are good, bad, or ugly; I will never have enough money to know. But I do know if I had a strand I could test it.
And in regard to cables, there are some surprisingly common practices that can be fairly easily quantified on a test bench as being poor choices for good audio quality.
Unbalanced signal transmission would be a good example. I don't care how much your RCA cables cost, if you are in a bad EMI environment a $0.20/ft shielded Cat 5 cable will mop the floor with the RCA. Of course if you are spending $60K on an audio system I expect you can afford to build your listening room in a Faraday cage.
I can't afford the Faraday cage or the expensive cables, so my entire system is balanced. Which is why the builder's remark that his balanced cables don't sound as good as his unbalanced cables was puzzling to me.
I can send you a piece of the conductor wire and you can test it if you want, no problem. PM me a mailing addy and I'll get it out to you. You can take any two wires and measure SNR, THD, wire resistance, etc. and conclude if they have identical performance using those metrics. What can't be measured easily, if at all, is the efffect capacitive reactance can have on each frequency that results in sound exiting the cable that is diffferent than what entered at the source end, known as "timbral shifting". Some call this "color" or "flavor". Dialectric absorption can shift timbral balance audibly, and some cable companies actually manipulate this phenomenon to give their brand of cables a signature sound. A good audio cable should disapear completely, IMO.
Here is the real kicker, since we are talking about low impedance microphone cable, the impact of a wire's resistance and the dielectric properties of it's insulators on tonal balance far exceeds it's impact on speaker wire, for example. If someone ever invents a device that can measure the effects of capacitive reactance on tone with otherwise equally performing conductor wire, companies like Monster could be exposed for manipulating this fact to fleece consumers, but since there is no such device, it's impossible to prove.
What we do know is that as wire guage increases, resistance decreases, and dielectric properties affect capacitive reactance. Using PTFE instead of PVC, and 20AWG wire instead of the more common 22 AWG(with 25% greater resistance than 22AWG) and even smaller, were specific choices made to address these concerns. Ultimately, it's up to the user to decide, one reason we have a 30 day money back guarantee, so the risk to a consumer for trying LAT products is low.