Doug, you make several good points, most intriguingly that replacing a menagerie of cables from various manufacturers with uniform cabling from one manufacturer, may be a prerequisite for getting a sense of how cables influence a system. As I have not tried this approach I suspend judgment but remain skeptical. Assuming that a particular manufacturer's cables all share the same sonic signature, I can see that an accumulation of such cables would tend to reinforce & reveal that signature more clearly-- which might or might be a good thing for a particular system. But just as often as advocating this approach, cable mavens seek out different cables for voicings of a tactical nature, believing in the manner of oenophiles that a certain lightweight CDP might benefit from a taste of peat and chocolate, or a syrupy oil-capped 300B may be complemented by a lighter grape from the sunny side of the vineyard. Committing to one cable manufacturer implies a synergistic approach, but one might just as well extend this construct and commitment to one manufacturer for all components in a system. There are of course credible manufacturers like Linn who have persuaded customers to purchase homogenious systems by virtue of good engineering or good marketing, and others like Krell with its Cast system, who engineer proprietary links between components. But one must carefully peal the onion of market-speak and/or suffer many bad spends to arrive at the truth on this point.
A look inside some top $10K components reveals lots of $.30/ft microphone cable and other budget wire. Worth starting there, where $50 in hook-up wire may make as much of a difference as a $1000 interchassis IC.
