How important are speaker cables to the sound emanating from the speakers?

Warmglow, my saying is "cables matter'. These days I tend to spend about 50-60% of the msrp of my components on cables, but that is my limit. But I don't advocate spending money on cables without considering the overall synergy of your system. My approach to system building is to start with buying the best speakers you can afford which you love & build your system around those speakers incl: amp(s), front end, cables, AC power, isolation & racks. Everything matters.

I personally like the sound of Jorma Design cables from Sweden. They sound natural, resolving and musical. Their top Prime cables are also a touch on the warm side and sound harmonically rich which is great with female voice, jazz and classical where they come into their own. But pop and rock are very well served also. Their overall neutrality allows them to be even handed with a wide range of music and system configurations.

I recently upgraded from Jorma Prime speaker cables to Jorma Statement. The improvement was quite startling. The Statements retained the natural sound, but sounded much more resolving & opening up a wide vista in the sound statge. They are special cables. Jorma said Statement single wires sound better than Prime Bi-wires.

Though even Jorma Unity sounds great at its price point. Unity is most reminscent of Prime in its sound signature (ie: sounds a touch warm & is harmonically rich, though not 'lush'). I use a Unity power cable with my Oppo player. But there are many other good cables. No doubt our resident loony Captain Cobalt will post how miraculous Tara Labs cables are, lol!

Some points to keep in mind:

1)Nearly all speaker cable effects are proportional to length. That is one of the reasons monoblock amplifiers can be advantageous -- they can make it possible for the speaker cables to be very short.

2)In general, speaker cable effects will tend to be greater if the impedance of the speakers is low, or if the impedance of the speakers dips to low values at some frequencies.

3)Amplifiers which use significant amounts of feedback, have low output impedance, and have wide bandwidth may, at least in some cases, tend to have greater sensitivity to speaker cable differences than amplifiers that don't. Solid state amps are more likely to fall into those categories than tube amps.

Regards,
-- Al

Speaker cables can be very important, and many do sound  different from each other. Modest priced cables that I like include Discovery Essential and Kimber 8TC. Both will hold their value if you decide to sell. There are some great deals now on the Transparent MM2 series now that the Gen 5 series is out.