First, let me give you a little background on myself, so you can "know the source"... I'm a Sr. Electrical Engineer working in the Professional Audio field. I design high end pro-audio equipment. You've heard my stuff, as it's been used all over. I have also designed stuff for a small "audiophile" company. I'd also call myself a Skeptic, and a practical person. My pet peeve is worthless pieces of expensive audiophile junk. That being said:
There are two ways to approach this: Does it work? and Is it worth it?
Does it work: Yes! Um, no. Well, maybe. It depends on what you define as "work". If you define "work" as "can it, in theory, make a positive difference when compared to normal speaker cable" then it does work. But if you define work as "makes a positive difference that an expensive piece of gear can measure, or that can be determined by multiple listeners in a double-blind test" then the answer is no.
Is it worth it: These things cost US $8500 and make such a small improvement that no one can really hear it (or can prove that they hear it). A good pair of practical speaker cables will cost about $30. For the $8470 price difference, what could you buy that would make more of a difference in your life/happiness? A vacation to a remote tropical island? A semester in a University? The ultimate man-cave? With these speaker cables all you get is bragging rights that you can blow lots of money. Get spinners for your car, they'll attract more attention that speaker cables. So, um, no. They aren't worth it.
Here's an interesting article about comparing expensive Monster speaker cables to a wire coat hanger. Spoiler: The coat hangers work quite well.
The ideal speaker cable is short-ish, reasonably large (but not absurdly large) gauge, and set up as a twisted pair. Nothing else really matters.
There's not any special name for it that I know of. Vibration Speaker/Vibration Transducer/Surface Transducer. These names are all used interchangeably. It's simply the voice coil of a speaker with a mechanism to attach to a flat surface rather than having a cone attached.
Here is an article on the technology which is pretty much the same as speaker technology has always been:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/audio-music/vibration-speakers.htm
And here is the transducer itself without as much plastic housing and markup:
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?PartNumber=300-375
You could build it up from really raw components though. Magnet + voice coil + method to attach to surface.
I used to work in a speaker repair shop. During the reconing process, we would sometimes run the voice coil with the cone removed by hooking up a frequency generator to check for damage to the coil. A big enough speaker supplied with enough power would vibrate the bench. If the speaker had been attached securely, it would have the same effect as a Vibration Speaker.
Best Answer
The #1 issue with speaker cables is that they have a fixed resistance, and the speaker has a impedance that varies with frequency. (Note: you can almost use the terms resistance and impedance interchangeably in this context.) When you combine the wires resistance with the speakers impedance you'll get, basically, a voltage divider. The net effect of this is that the resistance of the wire will change the frequency response of the speaker.
Here's a graph that shows the speaker impedance and frequency response
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20130228153033/http://www.qscaudio.com/products/speakers/acoustic_design/ad_s52/ads52_freq.htm
Notice that the average impedance is 8 ohms, but really varies between 4 and 33 ohms. Now, let's say that your wire has a resistance of 10 ohms (that's super high, but I'm illustrating a point). At 500 Hz the speaker has a 5 ohm impedance. This effectively makes a voltage divider that cuts the power going to the speaker by 5:15, or 1:3. So if the amp is spitting out 100 watts, only 33 watts is making it to the speaker. But at 2 KHz the speaker impedance is about 30 ohms. That means that the voltage divider is more like 30:40, or 75 watts from the 100 watt amp output is making it to the speaker.
The end result of this is that the higher the resistance of the cable, the more the frequency response of the cable is going to be affected. When you size the gauge of the cable to minimize this resistance, odds are that the cable is going to work fine for whatever current you actually need to move-- unless you're doing pro-audio and have several kilowatt amps.
A really rough rule of thumb is that you want the cable resistance to be less than 10% of the nominal speaker impedance. So for an 8 ohm speaker you'd want less than 0.8 ohms in the cable. Of course, if you want to know for sure then you have to look up the impedance graph on the speaker and start calculating.
When this is all distilled down, you'll find that 16 gauge wire works for most home applications unless you have your amp a long way from the speakers (which you shouldn't do anyway).