There is a correction. For every doubling of surface area the awg goes up by a factor a 2 not 1. I had read it was one, but the awg charts shows it is 2.
So to go from 24 awg to 18 awg is only a 4 wire bundle and one piece of Ethernet cable all wires in parallel is 16awg.
I see where you are coming from Hal, but resistance is better for my experiments and Guy's and others who will perform future experiments with their speaker wires.
1. DC wire resistance is easily available in the gauge charts.
2. Paralleling wires will automatically reduce the inductance at higher frequencies.
3. What we are interested in is both 1 and 2 since the DC resistance affects the damping factor and the inductive reactance affects sound at higher frequencies. We need to optimize both total DC wire resistance and inductive reactance to the whole speaker.
I don't mean anything by disagreeing, just wish to keep things meaningful, straight forward, and simple.
cheers
steve