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Just curious how others prioritize the importance of cables according to the position within the system.

For myself personally I find the interconnect closest to the source, phono stage to pre-amp, CDP to pre-amp, to be much more critical than pre-amp to power-amp; I exclude TT to phonostage since I've always used a hardwired IC on the TT, e.g. no experience here.

I also find interconnects in general to be more important than speaker wire but would admit that this could be easily due to a relative lack of experience with spk. cable ... thus very intersted in views on this area.

Good phono cables are very important. Such a low level signal and very prone to changes in capacitance.

I think cabling up line-level signals (like a CD player) is less critical. I would hazard to say that bad cables can be the worst thing to happen to you but on the other hand I don't think you need to spend a lot of money to have a good cable. Connectors that aren't loose and provide a lot of surface area contact. Wires that are well shielded with a decent dialectric material to keep capacitance at bay. Capacitance is less of a problem on a low-Z output, but still it's better not to have too much.

Speaker cable, for me, is the most important. Here you've got the possibility to lose power, damping factor, and to create feedback problems (meaning if your speaker cables pick up noise, they can inject it into the amplifier via a feedback loop).

Some people like to "bi-wire" their speakers but I don't think this is a good idea. Specifically if you have a high-capacitance wire in parallel with a high inductance one, you're setting up a resonant circuit to feed your speakers. Some people like this because it "smooths out the highs" but in fact it can blunt transients in much the same way as a poorly biased tube amp.

While it's true that the idea is that different cable structures are optimal for different frequency ranges, it doesn't mean that the solution is to parallel two different solutions. Of course if you bi- or tri- amp then you can use the optimum cable for each frequency band.

In fact, the very best thing you can do with speaker cable is to make it as short as possible. I have considered changing my amplifier layout in order to put each amp right behind the speaker rather than having them centrally located. Of course, I've only got 2+ meters of cable on each side but still I think it would be better if it were 1/2 meter.

Pt

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For myself personally I find the interconnect closest to the source, phono stage to pre-amp, CDP to pre-amp, to be much more critical than pre-amp to power-amp;

I am in agreement with your opinion.

HBomb