Cable vs. Electronics: biggest bang for the buck

Sean, I agree with you as far as signal degradation. We are on the same page with a few semantics. However, I don't believe we are to the point where we can measure performance with any amount of true certainty. Just read a couple of issues of Sterophile.
I will use the example of Vandersteen speakers. They measure about as perfect as any loudspeaker that you will find at any price. I personally am bias towards the speakers. My 3A Sigs. and 2WQ's sound so good its scary. Yet, look how many people say they are laid back, rolled off, poor transparency and etc. (I must be deaf because I have used many a speaker and I can't agree with this assessment.) Now look at the number of people who rave over proven inaccurate loud speakers as shown in test results. We accept +- 10 db as accurate? I still believe that accuracy is in the ears of the beholder. If not, explain these inconsistences away. What defining piece of equipment do we have? What cables? Etc. Etc. Look at tubes. They really test pretty poor vs. a transistor amp. Spec. wise, which would you buy? But how many people think they sound better? By the way, I'm not picking on you, I just feel very strongly that this industry has lost its roots and is pushing whatever they can sell by whatever means(mostly by propagada.) They are forcing us poor neurotic souls to purchase that perfection which is not obtainable. I for one cringe at the amount of money I have spent over the last 35 years in search of the Holy Grail. Of course on the opposite end, we have done this to ourselves by buying some of this stuff. Its like buying a Polo shirt vs. one sold at Walmart. They all cover your back. Maybe we should turn the tag out. I paid $10,000 for cable XYZ and had to add $750 for the connectors! Look what I bought for $10,750 Don't it sound great! Now do you really think that someone who just purchased these would say these things suck?

One of the factors in my review that I think perhaps gives it a little credibility is the fact that the cables were not mine and had to be returned to their true owner. I had no investment to justify and really felt no obligation to the owner to like the cables. The problem arose when the cables were broken-in and sounded better than anything I have ever heard before.
The question was raised as to whether the cables I used up to that point were of poor(er) quality. They were not. Up to the point when I was loaned the Dominus cables, the best I had ever heard were the Purist Colossus. The first time I heard them I was sold. Unfortunately I could not afford them and they went back to the store. Over the past few years I was able to purchase them and have never regretted the decision. The Dominus are just that much better.

I don't know about the physics (I only got A's and B's in college physics) or the bench test measurements. To a large degree I don't even care about them. I leave things like that to smarter people like Sean, whose opinion I value. I buy based on what I hear in my room. I believe I have a fairly well balanced system, which is not to say it requires no improvement. I calculate it to be in the $30,000 range. At the level I'm dealing with I can justify based on my experience spending a disproportionate amount of money on better cables because results are there!
I am not suggesting spending $3000 for cable on a $1000 system. I think these purchases need to be balanced (although I prefer single-ended).
Better cables tend to do less bad things to the signal, so anything less than better cables are resticting the ability of your system to sound it's best. If I can follow this logic it seems as though everything spent on better cable is justified while what is spent on electronics is suspect at best. BUT you can't listen to cable without electronics.
My conclusion? I will be buying the best cables I can afford right now even though it is enough to upgrade my amp or speakers if I chose to go that route.

Bigtee: Actually "we" are closer to good measurements correlating with good sound than you might think. The trouble is, they are not necessarily the same measurements, taken the same way, that manufacturers report specs or magazine reviewers do measurements.

Floyd Toole has a white paper (a few years old now) on the Harmon Web site (www.harmon.com, I believe) on the art and science of speaker design, in which he discusses the relationship between speaker measurements and listener preferences. Of course, he's doing his measuring in a real anechoic chamber, and he's doing his listening tests blind. Neither of which you get in a Stereophile review.

Agree with Rcrump. In fact 10% was my rule of thumb. I make my own cables (it's not rocket science) so I can get quite nice looking and sounding cables for my whole system for a few hundred dollars. (My system is about $4k).

Bomarc, One tiny little problem. In the Floyd Toole article, it seems that he is out to justify the means (so to speak{er}.) It is a know fact that frequency response alone can be adjusted to reflect a "Certain" sound as in laid back or up front. However, how do we account for the difference in transparency, soundstaging, proper timbral allocation and the like? Speakers test perfect on whatever test and still sound like crap. I haven't seen this measured myself. Another good example of measurements gone astray is electrostatic speakers. Because of their inherent design, they are not going to measure very flat. They are subject to unreal reflections from the room and unless you are using multiple panels, one cannot reproduce the entire frequency spectrum without problems simply because the whole panel wants to vibrate at the same frequency. With the constant changes in amplitude, it is not going to be an accurate speaker frequency wise. However, there sure are a lot of people who like them.