Inteligent high end cableing

Tm12 and Brulee are right on. The CST (Conicident) IC is amazing value, and better than everything that I have tried. HT is not even close. I tried the top of the line from a dozen name companies before the CST. I do not know about the speaker cable, but it is reported to be just as good as the interconnect. I use monoblocks, and back them right up to the speaker and use 6 inch links of Siltech, which essentially is like not having a speaker cable, given there is more, and lower quality, hook-up wire inside any speaker than I am using to connect from amp to speaker - so I am not about to thry the CST speaker cable.

Redkiwi's post re 6 inch spkr cables is intriguing, as I, too have monos close to speakers, but was warned both by Nordost and YBA to use 1.5m min length speaker cables because of some resonance issue! Is this a bunch of crap? Powered speakers certainly benefit from direct-connect, no? As it turns out I mounted my monos (Aleph 2s) UNDER my floorboards, so needed 2m to thread up the baseboards, anyway. Any thoughts on min length parameters?

Emanse, I actually played around with various lengths of the cables I like (lots of time spent terminating cables). Even at lengths less than a meter, shorter still sounded better. So I tried 6 inches of 8TC (not my favourite cable), and it outperformed 30 inches of Wireworld Gold Eclipse. I tried a few better cables at 6 inch lengths and the result was very little difference between the cables (when the differences at 1m were substantial). I certainly did not experience any instability with any of the cables. My monos are tube, the speakers Martin Logan.

Redkiwi, that is interesting. I'm thinking of making some short cables, to go along with the little 2A3 mono kit I'm going to buy (I noticed nobody replied to my thread about those). ARE YOU SAYING THAT 6 INCHES OF 8TC SOUNDED BETTER THAN GOLD ECLIPSE 3 speaker cable, or was it GOLD ECLIPSE??? Have you ever tried the thin banana connectors from Nordost or AQ? I'd like to use bananas on the speaker end, to be compatible with Maggies (when I use them). And if I could find silver ones, that'd be ideal.

It was Gold Eclipse 2, and yes, short 8TC sounded more open. But the Wireworld cable has high capacitance and my experience with it could be amplifier dependent. At six inches, I heard none of the characteristics of 8TC that I usually do not like about it, but I did hear an improvement when I tried the Siltech instead of the 8TC, principally in greater mid-range texture, where the 8TC tended to smooth things. The Siltech, by the way, that I used was just their silver hook-up wire lightly twisted, as I did not believe that cable geometry would make a significant difference over this length. I have not tried the Nordost bananas, but the small AQ bananas sound very good and are cheap - probably the best value for money around.