cable length

I disagree with the statement "get the very best you can afford." This implies that more money will buy better sound, which may or may not be true. It is very possible to put together a rather mediocore sounding system with very expensive components. I say get the one that sounds the best in your system. Of course, this means you must audition various cables in your system, which is a lot more effort than simply buying the most expensive thing you can afford at the moment.

Pops & Bloom are right, speaker cable 6ft shortest length or you will have no resale value, I doubt you can hear the differnece between 6ft or 3ft speaker cables anyway.

Power cords go with 2 meter or 5-6 ft length, same reason
for resale value and practicality.

In any kind of cable--IC, speaker, or power--you generally want it the shortest that it takes to get between whatever points it's connecting. Of course, you'll want some slack to facilitate moving, installing, positioning, and such. But don't use 15 feet if you only need 10, for example. Increased length only adds series resistance, series inductance, and shunt capacitance to the overall circuit.

70242: Since you are back and able (and into the numbers of this all). There is talk by certain manufacturers (not all involved in cable) that a certain minimum length is required with some cable and some components to achieve best sound, or signal transfer be it may. Off hand, Bel Canto suggests (in regard to their DAC) that the analog IC's be the same, or even better, longer than the digital IC for the best sound. Mapleshade claims that their speaker cable sounds best when used in 8 to 12 ft lengths under normal circumstances (note the maximum length). In regard to digital cables I have read that 42" (think that was it) is the optimum length and that it had something to do with completing a full "wave length" or "cycle"
that is produced with the tranmittal of digital signals. I don't have a clue as to what these people are talking about, but in the case of Mapleshade I was talked out of using their speaker cable until I could shorten the length of my runs. The alternative was using the cable un-twisted and isolating each wire (four total) from each other by 12" (which is a 36" spread). It also seems that I have read that some PC's work better when they are a minimum of 5' long. I would seem that if any of these claims are true, that shorter is not always better. The one that interests me the most is the "digital wave, or maybe they used the word "cycle" length. Has anyone else, that understands them, read these claims.

I read something similar a while ago about length of digital coax cable. I can't remember which company it was, but they were talking about the ringing in the cable. Some of the signal echos in the cable, and if the cable was less than 1.5M long, then the digital echo could interfere with the signal currently being processed. They claimed that 1.5M was the shortest cable that should be used for digital connections, but I found it funny that after explaining all of that, that company sold 0.5M, 1.0M digital cables as well.