Opinions

+1 mr_m. Same for power cords IME.

Dave

I see. Usually at the source, yeah, but you would have to experiment. And I would certainly maintain one brand approach.

I think your biggest concern is which interconnect to buy that will work best for your tastes and in your system.  It would be helpful to know what interconnects you're using now and what you're areas you're looking to improve upon and you'll likely get some good recommendations here.  Once you choose you can try it in both positions and then it's up to you regardless of what we say here. 

All of my cables are now Transpareny Audio. They are more on the lower end if the scale using the Super MM2 technology and Ultra XL. All cables are balanced (xlr). Speaker cables are TA Super MM2 as well. The power cords are TA Premium. As for replacing the DAC, I'm not sure if I doubled the cost of the Codex on a different DAC, I could possibly equal it but not sure if would beat it. At that point, where does it end? I recently upgraded cables to the Super and Ultras and I noticed huge differences in sound quality. That was why I was kicking around upgrading once again to TA Referance balanced but I could only do one pair at this time. That's why I'm looking for opinions on the best placement of the TA Referance along with one set of my existing cables in the system.

My advice: jump off the Transparent merry-go-round. Love my TA Reference XL XLR IC’s but there are a lot of great alternatives for far less $$.

However, if you have the money to spare, TA’s top stuff is hard to beat.

Dave