The diameter of the conductors on the Decware cable are 5.58mm and the OD is 7.22mm. A typical fire hose has an ID of 38-76mm. The scale on the screen isn't deceptive, but your description of 8AWG cable is.
Your mistake, it seems, is taking rather obviously figurative language literally.
"Fire hose" is a common colloquial expression for speaker wire that is very large in diameter.
The Google search ""fire hose' speaker wire" turns up nearly 60,000 hits, so clearly I am not alone in that rhetorical flourish.
As for comparative size of speaker wires of various gauges, I snapped two (crappy cell-phone) pictures this morning.
The first one shows the relative conductor size of four different wires, three of which are marketed expressly as speaker wire and the last of which is the same mil-spec (M22579/11, silver-plated copper with teflon insulation) as the Decware wire, but 16AWG rather than 8AWG.
The four different wires are, in ascending thickness/descending #:
-16 AWG stranded (mil-spec M22579/11, silver plate OFC copper) with teflon insulation
-14 AWG solid core six-nines with teflon insulation (Esoteric Audio Isopath)
-12 AWG stranded six-nines copper with PVC insulation (Esoteric Audio "Streetwires" car-fi marketed wire, purchased ca. 1994)
-8 AWG stranded six-nines copper (JL Audio XA-BLUSCS-8; I don't know what gauge the individual strands are, but they are visibly finer than the M22759/11 spec's 29AWG individual strands) with PVC insulation
Note that the wire in the original few posts of this thread has about has somewhat more copper in it than the thinnest wire pictures, and somewhat less than the second-thinnest wire. But in terms of physical bulk it is likely bigger than all save perhaps the 8AWG wire, due to all of those extra insulation tubes. So it will be much more annoying to run, without actually providing thicker conductors.
And a comparison of relative jacket size, with the understanding that the Decware will have a thinner overall diameter than the 8AWG wire pictured above because it has thinner insulation.
As you can see, a single one of the JL Audio 8AWG wire's two jackets is very nearly the size of the entire Esoteric Audio Isopath wire with two solid core 14AWG conductors inserted into their own teflon tubes and twisted together, with the resultant twisted-pair then strung through a third PVC tube! What you can't see is how much more flexible the thinnest wire is, compared to the other three. (Though in fairness, the solid core "high end" speaker wire is the least flexible.)
Now, let's take the latest speaker for which measurements exist on Stereophile, the little Thiel floorstander. It has a minimum impedance of about 3?, which is on the low end for typical domestic speakers. Yet even with that speaker. Assuming one's runs are less than roughly
eighteen feet, all four of those speaker wires will perform
identically. (For runs of ~30' or less, the bigger three wires will be identical in performance.)
Given that they are all identical in performance - and that
is a given, to anyone who has not abandoned rationality - if you had runs of 15' to a pair of those Thiel speakers* which wire would you rather try to conceal in a room?
*Though in practice anyone actually serious about music reproduction, as opposed to an "audiophile" who likes to collect expensive audibly irrelevant baubles and show them off to other members of that particular tribe, will likely have asymmetrical run of speaker wire unless the amplifiers are built into the speakers. Why? S/he will accept a room arrangement that puts components between a set of speakers. With a partial exception for dipoles with equipment stuck in the null of their radiation pattern, large, sharp-edged boxes between loudspeakers cause audible diffraction and damage to the sonic image.
You don't know if the $0.92/ft cable has exactly the same specs as the Decware. No specs are shown on that website.
You can't be serious, though in the most technical sense of course you are correct as ApexJr does not offer the same colors as Decware. (I'm sure some idiot somewhere will make an argument that the different colors of teflon sound different. I am going to assume nobody here is quite that stupid.)
However, in terms of technical spec, the ApexJr website clearly lists their wire as "mil-spec," lists the conductors as "silver plated copper," and the insulation as the generic term for teflon.
How many mil-spec 8AWG silver-coated copper with teflon insulation wire specs do you think exist?
Though for another perspective,
here is an eBay auction for 50 feet of the same wire with a blue jacket for $75.00.
in the world of high end speaker cables, I'll bet most audiophiles would consider $250. for a 10 foot pair a bargin.
That speaks far more to how large the gulf between "audiophiles" and "reality" is than anything else.