Single brand vs. multiple brand ICs and ACs

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.