As a cable skeptic, I'm wondering how the length of speaker cables plays into this. If we assume that the perfect cable is transparent, shouldn't the ideal situation involve extremely short runs? Since I run mono amps I have a very short run of Audioquest type 4 cables, 3 feet I think. I could pretty easily shorten this to less than a foot if I believed it mattered. Is 1 foot of moderately priced cable better than 10 feet of expensive cable? This length vs price relationship has to be relevant. And if this sort of thing is so important shouldn't we see a lot more mono dacs and preamps so you can send your digital signal from your digital source to the mono dacs right next to your speakers that are hooked directly to the preamp that is hooked directly to the amp that is hooked directly to the speaker? Why not just eliminate significant analog cable runs altogether? I could buy a second identical dac, use only one channel on each one but make the dac/preamp/amp connections essentially plug to plug. If cables have the potential to do such harm why not just get rid of them? It's terribly difficult for me to believe any of the cable talk. I feel a little bit bad about it.