Which Cable Makes the Biggest Impact?

The most important is the interconnect for your source like a CD player then pre to power,then speaker cables then Ac cord...

Power Cords.
1. DAC and Transport
2. Pre Amp
3. Power Amp

For interconnects.
1. Source to pre
2. Pre to power

In my opinion speaker wires are every bit as important as interconnects so if you need to make a significant change with just one pair of interconnect or one pair of speaker wire I'd go for the speaker wires first since this represents a complete change in one section of the signal path, assuming all other factors are equal. Conversely I see changing just one pair of interconnects in a standard two pair interconnect system (source to pre, and pre to power) as effecting a change to only half of the interconnect chain. As to which cable is of utmost importance, I think it really depends more on the state of your systems current cables with an eye for it’s weakest link, not an absolute standard. At the end of the day every cable in the chain is equally important and no cable can be ignored when synergy is your goal.

Hope this helps,
LM

Stumbled on this article and thought I’d share it with this thread.

An excerpt from the article is below.

http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6418215

"Ordinary 60-Hz power travels miles from the nearest power station over ordinary, oxygen-rich, noncryogenically frozen wires laden with bird poop. It goes through a local distribution transformer (gobs more regular wire in there) and then travels hundreds of feet more through your house wiring to a local outlet. Do you think the last 6 ft of cryogenically altered, helically wound, hand-braided, eight-gauge wire makes any sensible difference?

You could probably solder together old, rusty coat hangers and do just as well, provided you don’t have any young children or pets in the house.

So what do you really need in a power cable? Insulation is a good idea. Stranding is good, too. Stranded wire is flexible enough to bend many times without breaking. That’s all the technology you need.

Ernie: How about shielding? A lot of high-end audio-power cables are shielded.

Howard: It’s a nice idea, but because all the other wires in the house lurking behind the dry wall remain unshielded, it doesn’t help to shield the last little 6-ft chunk."

which makes the biggest difference? the worst one in the worst application that you upgrade.

i've had it be the amp PC, the IC off the source, the PC off the source, the speaker cable.

but never the digital cable! so there!

(in all seriousness, there are no hard & fast rules; i thought if a component had a well designed power supply it would be immune; the Esoteric XO1-D2, which is built like no other player, disproved my theory with its sensitivity to power cords).

This whole discussion of power cables brings me to another un-answered question I wrote back in the spring of 2006...If we have literally hundreds of miles of so-so electrical cable running through our lives...why not just use the same Romex cable that runs through our walls for our audio systems? It seems like this would be the best we could do to keep the flow the same.

I don't mean to hi-jack this thread so if anyone has an idea let me know.

For me the order is:
Interconnects,
Speaker cable,
Power cables (have never even tried any ones other than what came in the boxes with my equipment.)

Ben