I was trying to ask, simply, whether cables in a system are victim to the weakest link in the cable chain. I’m interested in how systems work, abstractly, and I’m also interested in practical applications. That is, I’m interested in "the big picture"
The big picture, as it says on my system page, is that everything matters. The "weakest link" concept applies only to the extent it might guide you towards doing things that get the most improvement for your time and money. But every single little thing you can think of anywhere you can think of it, each one is only about as important as any other.
Take AC wire, for example. There’s a treatment Total Contact that when applied to the outside of a wire greatly improves sound quality. You might think it will work best inside a component, or inside the room. But I have crawled under the house and put this stuff on wires going all the way back to the breaker panel. It comes in a 1.5ml syringe. I know how much went where. The first 5 feet from the panel makes just the same improvement as the last 5 feet in the room.
The beauty of this is when you find something like this that is very cost-effective then instead of having to buy ever more and more expensive components you can greatly improve what you already have and get there for a lot less. This is embraced as great news by people like me and Mahgister; dismissed by people who seem to have inexhaustible supplies of fiat currency for buying ever more expensive upgrades; and derided by people who either cannot hear or cannot believe their own ears. There’s a lot of different personalities out there trying to be audiophiles.
When I first started reading Audiogon with some real attention, about two years ago, I was flummoxed by the differing opinions to questions that I took to be straightforward.
There are also a lot of audiophiles who simply have not yet developed the requisite skills needed to form a sound opinion. This is almost always the case early on. I can still recall back in 1990 my inability to hear any difference between CD players and DACs. Took me a good few months running around hearing lots of different things until suddenly one day Eureka! Then in no time flat there were all kinds of increasingly obvious differences between .... everything.
At least that’s the way it seems now in hindsight. Back then though it wasn’t sudden at all. It was months and months of driving around straining in vain- and not getting much encouragement. Because when the salesman has a vested interest you can’t count his encouragement, and the other fellow in the store can’t hear any difference either (this happened more than once!) and even the so-called audiophiles at the so-called audiophile club aren’t much better, its long odds.
That’s just the listening angle. There’s also technology, electronics, physics, acoustics, and psycho-acoustics to contend with. So don’t be too surprised people have greatly differing opinions. This ain’t easy. Not easy at all. There’s a saying, nothing worth doing ever is.