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

I noticed a big improvement by selling my speaker cables, removing my speaker binding posts, and wiring the crossovers directly to the amp outputs with short (18") Cardas copper litz wire (11.5gauge) in twisted pair. Sounded much better than my expensive 10' speaker cables.

- Its been well established in the prior posts herein that speaker cables matter. The naysayers can  have their opinions, and let's avoid those stupid cable war posts and respect differing opinions.

- for the many,  the sonic benefits of different cables (thst is  all of different brands AND different price points) are very system dependent and one size does not fit all.

- As you move up  the quality build kit strata with the increased resolution capabilities to make it work, the added cost gear may make it worthwhile to move up the speaker cable selection pricepoint in lockstep with ICs and power cables.

Conversely, there is also no guarantee that new Brand X at a loftier pricepoint will actually deliver that quantum leap ethereal sonic performance benefit. Brand name alone and price point alone are  no guarantees that you will like the outcome - full stop . You HAVE to audition yourself in your OWN system.

the takeaway:

i will rehash  a prior post to serve as a litmus test that cables DO matter. and you don't need to resort to any blind test as the only silver bullet poster child for an actual validation in an  audition shootout / bake-off of contenders and pretenders.

in brief: NORDOST ran a repeated 3-day audio expo demonstration symposium in Toronto on that very issue, it was attended by thousands . It was also attended and written up as such in a  Canadian AUDIO mag

He wrote an article that highlights his litmus test on the effects of swapping in better cables as reported by him reporting on the shared observations of the thousands of attendees at the TAVES audio expo in Toronto in Nov 2014. With reference to the  above , ... his conclusion summarizes it well.

Nordost

"... I had a chance to sit in on a couple demonstrations in the Nordost room, giving my feet a well deserved break. I’m very familiar with the benefits of high quality cables and use a full Nordost Heimdall 2 loom with my reference two-channel setup. That being said, I always find the Nordost demonstrations to be an “ear-opening” experience.

Michael Taylor from Nordost demonstrated the significant sonic benefits of replacing an OEM cable with a Nordost model – in particular

1) a swap of a single USB cable, from OEM to Nordost Blue Heaven ($250/2m), to Heimdall 2 ($500/2m) and;

2) a swap of a single RCA interconnect, from OEM, to Blue Heaven, to Heimdall 2, to Tyr 2 and finally Valhalla 2.

Along with convincing the audience in the room that cables DO matter, I’ve now got the bug to upgrade...."

You are going to have to experiment yourself to find the better mix for your system gear .

Getting rid of the binding posts and wiring directly is an interesting idea. Next step would be getting the crossover out of the cabinets. That's what Michael Green did with his top of the line Chameleon speakers, other Chameleons had usual arrangements.

I did remove the crossovers from the boxes. I built separate enclosures for them (after replacing the cored inductors with much larger air cores there's no way they'd fit in the box anyway). The crossovers in the enclosures were then wired directly to each corresponding driver with twisted pairs of Cardas copper litz (11.5ga for woofers, 15.5ga for mids, 17.5ga for tweeters).
This increased the volume in the cabinets enough to let me add additional bracing to the boxes to stiffen them further and keep the same internal volume after bracing.
BTW, these are Infinity RSIIb speakers, if you're curious.

This makes for interesting reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_wire