How Much Have You Spent On Cables Throughout The Years. I'm Shocked When I Checked.

@durkn , + on your synthetic motor oil comment. I have to laugh back when I had that Orange Buell that’s my bio pic I had a stage IV motor with all the hot parts and Nikasil cylinders. The bike had a dry sump system that only held 1.8 qts total. It had high compression hence I had extreme head and lower end ventilation out and under the back seat. At one time I tried Royal Purple and apparently it has a low flash point. At stop lights the smell from the ventilation was so bad it made me sick to my stomach. I switched to Motul full synthetic and problem solved. Maybe I should try some on my cables. 😆 Cheers , Mike B. 

Seems like a rough guideline is 10-20% budget should be cabling. So 10k system would have ~1-2k in cabling.

it should be 50%

The cable company

This discussion about cables reminds me of something a recent video on DAC upgrades made vivid — the logic maps almost perfectly onto cables.
The core point the presenter makes is about what he calls "surviving the chain." 

At 14:09 he puts it bluntly:

"That is the standard that matters. Can the difference survive the chain? Can it make it through the preamp, the amplifier, the speaker, the room, and your listening position strongly enough to still matter? If the answer is yes, then now we're talking about a real audible mechanism. If the answer is no, then the story may be bigger than the effect. And that distinction is where a lot of money gets saved."

Substitute "cable" for "DAC" and the argument is identical. Any difference a cable introduces has to run that same gauntlet. Which means the question isn't really "is this cable better?" — it's whether whatever it does can still be heard after passing through your amplifier, your speakers, and your room.

He sets up why this is so hard at 1:36–1:59:

"The speakers, the room, bass integration, listening position, gain structure, system noise, amplifier and speaker interaction — that is where a lot of [these] arguments go off the rails."

Those are the dominant variables. Cables sit upstream of all of them. So if your room has peaks and nulls, if bass integration isn't sorted, if your listening position is compromised — you're unlikely to hear a cable change clearly enough to evaluate it honestly. And if those things are sorted, the bar for a cable to clear becomes genuinely high.

The presenter's broader point is that "the story may be bigger than the effect" — which is about as precise a description of high-end cable marketing as I've heard.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohuahjd-yxM&t=3s