Cardas or Nordost for Simaudio/Magico

Thanks guys, appreciate the input.  What's fun/frustrating about this hobby is the multitude of choices and many contradictory views (which sometimes leaves me missing Henry Ford).

@audphile1 Your guidance to start with SC and IC first and leave PC makes intuitive sense to me but I've had a couple of dealers tell me PC first.  Curious if you did some experimentation to arrive at that conclusion.  

I would think Cardas. Magico are very very revealing speakers and Nordost are pretty revealing. The combination is going to reveal the leanest of the Simm. 

I’d recommend trying Cardas Clear, Clear Reflection and Clear Beyond. I recommend auditioning for a week each. The sound will be of the same character with a difference in bass and midrange. The Reflection will be be the warmest / sassy and the Clear Reflection most detailed. You should take your time... these should be great fine tuning for your system. 

@dokosan I’m familiar with AZ cables. They lean warm sonically but they’re not bad cables. If you had stock power cords I would say start with power. 
Another reason for my recommendation on the order/approach is that in my experience stating from downstream components will make most difference, good or bad. That order is - speaker cables, interconnects between pre and amp, then move on to the interconnects from source to pre. If you want to start with power cords, the one on the amp will make the biggest impact - amp is what drives your speakers and if you have subpar cables there you have a bottleneck. 

I would definitely go with Cardas Clear. I own the A3’s and have an authentic Clear unbalanced interconnect between the phono stage and the preamplifier. Before I bought it, I listened to it in my rig. The overall sonics convinced me to drop the cash for the Cardas Clear.

A good buddy just got rid of his A5’s. He had the top Nordost speaker cables and may have had other Nordost in the chain? 

The reputation I’ve heard about Nordost is that they’re bright. IMHO, this isn’t a good match with Magico.

I’m also auditioning Cardas Parsec 9 meter XLR cables between the pre and power amps at the moment. I didn’t notice any improvement in sonics from a pro XLR cable I’d been using.

+1 @ghdprentice - Use cables for tuning. I took that advice and tried Cardas Clear for my rig.  It works.