Anyone familiar with Straightwire Black Silc

Tim, you need to use a sniper site -- it's the only way to do eBay IMO. Here's the one I use, but there are lots of 'em:

http://www.auctionsniper.com/default.aspx
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I have a cast iron electric solder pot that someone gave me (complete with solder ;--) It looks like it's from the 1940's or earlier. But it works just fine!
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Tim, you will need a high temperature solder pot (full of silver solder) to properly prepare that kind of wire for termination (it vaporizes the enamel insulation and solders all the strands together all at once.)

My recommendation is that you send the wire back to Straightwire and have them cut and reterminate it to your specifications. It's just not worth the hassle and expense of doing it yourself. Plus you'll have factory terminations which increase the resale value. Also, because of Straightwire's particular cable topology, you can use the same cable to make either a balanceed (XLR) or single ended (RCA) interconnect.
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The reason for the insulated multi-strand wire design (some with a teflon or nylon rod at the core) has to do with solving time smear, and began with Bruce Brisson's (owner of MIT) original design for Monster Cable. The cables consist of two or more different gauges of wire, with the thinner wire wrapped around the heavier wire, which means that for a given length of cable there's a longer length of thinner wire than fatter wire.

Why do this? It became known that HF favors traveling along surfaces and/or thin conductors, and at a higher propagation speed than LF, which tend to favor thicker gauge wire and travel slower. So by making the thin wire longer than the thick wire, the faster HF has to travel further than the slower LF and so they meet up at the other end of the cable at the same time. This leads to better image and soundstage and better rendition of timbres and overtones. Eliminating time smear is the holy grail of cable design.

With cables designed like Straightwire, Monster, MIT (and probably 90% of all other brands) it's essential that all the various wire sizes (which are insulated from each other along the cable itself) be tied together electrically at each end. Otherwise, the high and low frequencies may not take their intended route(s), thus defeating the built-in time smear correction.
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Tim, whether or not one agrees with the science/theory, the undisputable fact is that if you don't connect all the wire strands together electrically at each end of the cable, then you are not using its full conducting capability.
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Tim, I was suggesting you have Straightwire do the reterminating primarily for maintaining the resale value.

Wow! I didn't realize the pots were THAT expensive now. And don't forget to factor in the cost of enough silver solder to fill it up (check with Welborne to see if they have in fluxless and in bulk.)

On the other hand, there are a number of folks here in audioland that do reterminating for a lot less than Straightwire quoted you. Don't give up. Got to Google and search retermination AND audio AND cables.

Moon Audio is a good one:

http://www.moon-audio.com/Retermination.htm