In my relatively short experience with various amps and speakers, I found speaker wires do change the sound the system especially using one of those with lumps near the ends. :-)
I found there's no better cable than "no" cable ideally (for both speaker and interconnect). I have used 1' lenght Kimber type cables (close to being jumper wires) as close to the speaker terminals as possible from the mono block amps and long interconnects from the preamp. It gave me the best performance (no sound signature from the wires to speak of) driving both B&W M801's and Maggies in the past.
However, I found Monster M1 speaker cables to give me the best performance. I am sure there's better cables I haven't tried yet but so far, M1's make my system sing without adding any coloration or subtracting any information.
I guess I have learned the hard way that the "best" cables are the ones that give you most pleasure while listening to music and not the "sound," regardless of their cost. I find Monster M1's to be the best speaker cables between my Krell FPB600C and B&W Nautilus 802's for the front duties and 3 Bryston 7BST's for N-HTM1 and N-805's for the rear speakers.
Although cost of cables like Monster M1's are very small in comparison to the rest of the good cables avaialbe in the market and some may think I am crazy. But since I am happy with them, think of all the extra $$$ I have (or had...) for more CD's and DVD-A's - the beautiful music that really matters the most!
Happy listening.
Ki
