Biggest Improvement Speaker Cable Or Interconnects

Whenever I tweak my cabling I always do both. I recently tweaked everythink in my bedroom system to Nordost. I don't think it would have sounded right without matched cabling through out.

As for which to do first go for the best deal ;^)

I agree, start with your source and work your way down, no sense in preserving a signal that's already been degraded or colored.On mine I found the best improvement when I changed the IC from CD to preamp.

I am also a firm believer that "what has been lost at the beginning cannot be recovered" so work from the source downwards...

Based on experience with my own cables in customer environments, the IC's make the biggest difference, followed by the speaker cables. However, this really depends on the IC's. My IC's have extremely low capacitance (3.8 pF/foot), so they make a huge difference. It is fairly easy to make a good-performing speaker cable, but more difficult to make a good-performing IC. Many manufacturers therefore have better speaker cables than IC's, even at the same price levels and so they probably will make a bigger difference.

I think it depends on the current state of your system. If you're already completely outfitted, I would say wherever your cabling is the most compromised, whether that be interconnect or speaker cables. If your speaker cables are overly restricting the music, then spending a lot on a digital IC might not yield the results you hope for, if any at all. In that case changing speaker cables could make the biggest difference.

If you have no cables at all, have a single matching brand throughout, or have different brands of cables but at a similar performance level throughout, then I would agree with what the previous posts mention about getting the best cable starting form the source first.

I'll add something that might confuse you even more. The biggest improvement I've ever gained by changing cables was with a power cord upgrade. Sorry. Good luck!