AudioQuest vs Cardas XLR

OP what about you tell us about the equipment you have and the rest of your cabling? Both Cardas and Audioquest are amazing manufacturers, but both are not universal. And so are the rest of the top cable manufacturers like Shunyata, Transparent and Nordost. The closest I’ve seen to « universally good match » is Siltech and even those are not liked by everyone…

@jeffreyw  Well, having myself KEF Reference 3s with AQ power cords and having tried many combinations during the last 12 months, I would recommend you to go in the direction of pure silver or silver alloy (and not silver-plated) cables both for speaker and interconnects. 
The KEFs have amazing weight and physicality across the frequency range, but struggle to sound really « free » and unconstrained dynamically. Using silver-based cables really enables the speakers to shine. With the KEFs and the Mac amplification, I would tend to look away from Cardas, although I have no experience with the Beyond XLs which I hear are amazing. If you were to go the Audioquest route, I would go directly to the Firebirds then to get the PSS solid silver core. 
Personally, I preferred going outside of Audioquest because you get silver only starting almost at the top of their range, which would have meant it was beyond what I find still reasonable to spend for cables. Shunyata was a good match personally on my system but not everyone’s cup of tea (mix of solid OCC silver and copper tubes. Siltech was amazing as well. I read excellent things about Kimber’s silver cables but again, only available for their top-tier cables.

my 2 cents, YMMV

I concur with @decooney you might want to test out some speaker + interconnect looms before settling on a very nice interconnect. Nothing beats experience and trying out different metals and geometries across brands might give you some significant hints on which direction is good for you.

Audioquest has several manufacturing facilities from what my dealer told me. For cables,from what I remember, he told me that up to the Rocket series of speaker cables, up to the Rivers series for ICs and I don’t remember which series of PCs, the cables are made in Taiwan or China. And for the cables above these ranges, they are manufactured in regional hubs: US, Netherlands or Taiwan depending on your continent. 
So instead of spewing random misinformation on either Cardas or Audioquest, let’s stay on topic.