Think about it this way Promit. We can be fairly assured that the strands are twisting around inside the wire. We can also be assured that the electrons are going to take the shortest electrical path. So why should we rule out quantum tunneling here? I think it should be considered to be in play.
Here's the thing. Let's assume that tunneling is indeed happening between strands. What is actually tunneling? Electrons are the only sane possibility for this discussion, I hope. What's the implication? What are the actual
consequences of tunneling between the strands? Electrons cross between strands carrying charge is the only answer I can think of. But... current is already crossing between strands. That's the whole point of conductors in physical contact with each other. It doesn't appear to add any mechanism that wasn't already in play.
Secondly, what macro-level quantity changes as a result of tunneling? You can't simply claim that quantum tunneling happening in the wires somehow changes the output. Either voltage or current needs to change, as these are the terms driving the movement of a speaker driver element (cone, dome, ribbon, whatever). You've also hand-wavily proposed some time domain impacts in the form of "smearing", which would properly be some type of inconsistent phase relationship across frequencies. And all of these things can be trivially tested on a wire of any length without resorting to exotic physics or in fact any physics at all.
Ultimately you loop back to the same problem that every extraordinary audio claim suffers:
either the differing hardware generates a change in the signal which can be meaningfully measured by lab grade test equipment.
Or you claim is that the difference is detectable to human ears but not to test equipment. The latter option is something that the objectivist viewpoint (and thus the readership of ASR) soundly reject. To draw serious evidence for the former requires you to propose a measurable change of some type at the output end of the wire.
A proposed mechanism is not a proposed change to the signal. Worse still, the mechanisms you're proposing are already well known and well understood because they're highly relevant to making high frequency equipment in RF ranges. The impacts to DC resistance, impedance, inductance, propagation rate etc for different gauges and constructions of wire across various transmission frequencies are perfectly well known and they don't affect high power audio signals. They're not even a conversation until you're in roughly the
megahertz and up range.
The situation is of course exacerbated by your failure to run anything resembling an experiment, which makes me wonder why you're here at all. The entire existence of this site is to push back against the endemic "I could hear my credit card bill in the soundstage" that powers publications like Stereophile.