HOW CRITICAL ARE JUMPER CABLES

High quality jumpers for sure. I use Walker Silver Jumpers. Always connect main speaker wires to the woofer LF first then jump to HF from there. LF needs more power first then HF.  At least that’s what my understanding.

If the jumper cables are well built (as in 99% of HiFi speakers), absolutely nothing! they are NOT critical at all.

You hear a difference, there important.Made my own this summer using aeco banana plugs and neotech 12 gauge teflon wire...i tried mundorf 14 g/s and was detailed,sweet.The stranded neotech won out over solid... just a tad smoother i guess.

My Tannoy manual suggests wiring to the HF side first...but had to try all options and they were right. It is a small difference but the section that gets wired first sees a little more presence in my system at least.

My experience with jumpers is as follows. My current speakers are Vapor Audio Nimbus Blacks with WBT bi-wire posts. My current ("not going anywhere") speaker cables are Tellurium Black Diamonds with bananas at the amp end and spades at the speaker end. Initially, my first foray with bi-wire speakers were the Legacy Aeris towers with bi-wired posts. With the Aeris, my speaker wires were the Cerious Graphene Extremes and Cerious Graphene Extreme banana/spade jumpers which with what I felt were good results having nothing to compare the jumpers against. Sold the Legacy's, sold the Graphene speaker cables after acquiring the Black Diamonds, kept the graphene jumpers to use on the Nimbus. Of course, "upgraditis" and curiosity bested me to try a pair of Analysis Plus Big Silver Oval with spade/bananas. Wow, the difference was startling...the Analysis Plus jumpers clouded the sound and crushed dynamics. Yanked that junk out and back in went the Cerious jumpers and all was well... until...a pair of "as new" Tellurium Black Diamond spade/banana jumpers popped up for sale of which I jumped on them like a banshee monkey in heat! I can attest that this change absolutely elevated the level the performance across the board exponentially and although I have been tempted since to try other jumpers I have not bothered as my sensibilities convinced me that there is that magic synergy happening with matching the same brand and model of speaker wires and jumpers....