What type of cables make the most difference

oberoniaomnia,

The Van Alstine ABX Comparator review is comprised of three parts. You seem to have looked only at the first, regarding amps. The third part of the review is where I discuss testing cables. Please note the results obtained when using the ABX Comparator to test cables are dramatically different than with amps. 

I've been upgrading mine this year. I have found that power made the biggest improvement and I bought 3 of them. More than subtle. I tried them for a month before I bought them so it wasn't a case of "these only sound good because I paid for them". I didn't expect them to make a difference.

Then speaker because the speaker cable I tried was worse than what I have now and shipped it back. Also not subtle but not as much as the power cables.

Interconnects - more subtle, but there. I just replaced (tried some) earlier today.

In a high current system as most are, the “black background” people are hearing is actually something you hear. The blacker it is the less ripple of current you’re hearing. But that background even if you think is silent is actually sound that is part of the soundstage. The problem is it’s most cables is they’re not actually that great and are compressing the sound somewhat.  So a lot of people think speaker cables make a huge difference because they’ll get something that measures well and the compression and the ability to silence the background is actually masking most of the problems with your system. Let’s not forget they are microscopes.  Like extremely microscopic microscopes. So the speaker cable masks it but then you’re actually doing yourself a disservice because the speaker cable is going to be the bottleneck. The flip side of that is you buy a really good cable and you think it sounds like crap because it’s showing you how bad the rest of your cabling is

i bring up speaker cables because it is the easiest to help get the picture as it is the last down the line. This same thing can happen anywhere in your system

I my most expensive cable is at my amp  it was sent to me to try out by a salesman that knew what he was doing lol   My amp was my baby so how could I not buy a cable that made it sound like I switched from a stereo amp to a pair of bigger monoblocks and more than doubled my performance?

recently I have just about completely finished the cabling in ky system.  I had all but one good power cable.  I had all my good power cables in my more expensive electronics and bad be in streamer.  I figured this was the way to go but I was hugely mistaken.  For fun I switched some cables around one day and plugged a good one into my streamer and bad one into my preamp.  It was just as transformative as my amp cable.  
 

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have good filtering to your streamer and dac.  More so to your streamer.  All my cables are transparent and well filtered.  
the only cable I use to “tune” my system is at my dac.  I don’t want to tune my preamp because it is tube snd a warmer cable bloats the bass worse. 
also, the more closer the signal gets to the amp the bigger the soundstage gets.  If you have a cable that is too etched or too hard, you hear it amplified more and can create weird imaging boundaries 

You don’t need anything crazy for a streamer just good filtering. At dac, you want texture, tone, timbre and detail. Anything after that the characteristics start to stretch and are harder to notice. This is where you want soundstage and transparency