Kitch29 - I will eat my hat now because I think you are right. I took the OTA speaker cables out and put in my Wireworld Golden Eclipse III cables and something sounded more right about the whole thing. Listening some more I was not happy with the smearing I was now hearing from my panels (I drive Martin Logans with tubes), but the powerful bass of the OTA interconnects was great to hear. The OTA as an IC works very well in my system. The bass may be a wee bit dry, but otherwise is very powerful and tight, and goes way down. Bothered by the reduction in resolution up top I put the OTA back on the panels but left the Wireworld on the bass, and then for another permutation used a double run of the Wireworld on the bass (which improved things in a variety of ways including eliminating the dryness). It is clear to me now that the OTA as a speaker cable between my tube amps and the woofers was strangling things. I will have to listen to this some more, but there is no loss of pacing as I had feared. What is odd is that the panels sound better now than when I had the OTA on the bass. This suggests to me my tube amps were just not liking something about the OTA speaker cable on the bass and its performance in the upper frequencies was being affected.
Boy, does the system boogie now.
Boy, does the system boogie now.