I think it is important to keep all your interconnects and speaker cables in the same family. You can have one cable conflict the other and you can't really judge a cable IMO unless you match it up with like cables. You can put a very good cable on the speaker and have one of your ic's messing up its performance and or timing or any combination of things. I know a guy who went through this process and he had some mixed cables that gave him the sound he wanted but his timing and detail was off a bit. He replaced ic from source first with a new brand, result was good, then the pre to amp with same brand, the result was bad and muddied up the bass and rolled off the top. He then put the same brand from amps to speaker and wah-lah, beauty and magic once again. Some would have stopped at the pre amp when it totally screwed things up but what it was is the speaker cables were highly focused on bass and not very good at hi frequency but that ic to amps was not good on bass and very extended and bright on hi frequency, the sound of the combo was livable but timing was a issue. Once all cables were same in another line, all was good including timing. Mind you all of these cables were very good and well known cables even his mixed set that got replaced.