Nordost Red Dawn revII vs SPM

The SPM is much better. Do not know if it is worth 3 times the price.

Had both. Greater difference on the speaker cable than the I/C -- the reason, allegedly, that capacitance matching is not a major issue on the speaker cable... Agree w/ sugarbrie on the price differential though...

The SPM is much better than the Red Dawn. In fact, the Blue Heaven, at a lower cost than the Red Dawn, is in my opinion better to it --in every way. The Red Dawn is highly system dependent, whereas the Blue Heaven will work well in a variety of systems.

The red dawn is quite excellent, but the SPM is noticeably better in a high resolution system. I noticed an increase in detail almost immediately - and that was just swapping the amp/preamp cable alone. Part of it being worth it or not depends on the low level resolution of your system. For example: if I put the cable into my old denon/spica tc-60 system, I doubt if I could tell the difference. In my pass labs/audio physic virgo system, there was a noticable difference. Red dawn is a great cable by any measure.
Only You can decided:
Are you happier listening to a barely perceptibly increase in smoothness/detail, or watching your money shrivel away in tech stocks?

Believe it our not, as much as Red Dawn improved my Spica TC60/B&K system, the improvement wrought by SPM ICs was not subtle, quite obvious in fact. With the Alon V/Cary/Meitner system it was much more dramatic. Personally, I liked Red Dawn much better than Blue Heaven, both speaker & IC, fuller mids and bass. I think it's a fine cable. However, the SPM was better, and my new Quattro Fil is the best IC I've had in my system by a wide margin.