Single brand vs. multiple brand ICs and ACs

I use to mix and match interconnects using Silver Audio Appassionata, Bear Labs Silver Lighting and Granite Audio #444. When I demoed Pure Note Epsilon Reference I noticed that by mixing, it choked the sonics. Everything improved as soon as I went to all Epsilon Reference. With further experimentation I noticed my secondary system sounded better when I used all Granite Audio #444 interconnects.
(For what it’s worth) ;)

I think single brands approach is an effort to make it easier for the buyer and more sales for the company selling. If you do your homework you shouldn't have a problem. Its all about system matching.As one of the other posts mentioned if you want to go a certain (sound)direction you purchase a wire that will get you back to that.The best way is to try as many cables as you can get your hands on and weed out what you don't like. Good luck

I think using more than two brands of cables at any one time is enough to drive anyone crazy, and the same is true of two cables which are very different also. However, if you stumble across two cables which are generally similar in type of sound, but different in specific ways, it may work very well. After experimenting I have found that in my system using Purist Dominus interconnects and NBS Monitor 0 speaker and digital cables gives me a more detailed upper treble and especially lower bass than I could get with Dominus alone, but a warmer midrange in general, and especially lower midrange, than I could ever get with an entire system of Monitor 0, which I had for a while. But I doubt this kind of matching would ever have worked if the basic sound of the two cables wasn't generally quite close.

It has been my experience that cable companies excel at certain cables more than others. For instance,Hovland makes an excellent phono cable(Music Groove), it is hard to beat the Illuminati digital cable, top of the line Discovery speaker and innerconnects are also excellent. As others have said, it is best to try them in your system as cables tend to be very system dependent. I would not hesitate to pick and choose from various cables and get the best for your system. Good listening

It really depends on the cable company whether you will be sucessful with a full complement of their cables. Many companies use similar constructions for both their speaker cables and their IC's. This is an indicator that one of these is probably a good design and the other is a compromise. The requirements for each of these is so different that they should not resemble each other at all. Other companies try to optimize all of the cables, using their reference series to determine if they are doing the right things.

For my own cables, I have a philosophy. The idea is to enable the maximum bandwidth and minimize phase-shift for all cables up to the speaker cables. Then eliminate all resonant content by filtering ultrasonics at the speaker cables. Many of my customers use my IC's with other speaker cables with good results, but I believe that my own speaker cables will result in a more accurate and better focused image.