In my system the greatest impact was in speaker cable. I went from Original Monster Cable to Harmonic Technology Pro 9 pluses which was like a totally different front end was placed in my system. The one downside is the break in time of a new cable. When I first hooked up the cables I thought I had gotten screwed. I thought cable was cable. You must give cables time to break in. It took about 150 hours of break in before the speaker cables sounded even OK, and a additional 100 before they sounded great. IC's tend to be less dramatic in my system, but hey I bought my HT speaker cables first then replaced my Monster IC's with Cardas Golden Reference cables. The IC's were not quite as dramatic in my setutp. The really fine tuned my system. Tended flesh out vocals, Increased presence, and blacken the background. I do, however think that you should just bite the bullet and try a bunch of differnt IC's and speaker cables at one time to see what works best in your rig.
hope this helps.
Johnny
my .02 cents
hope this helps.
Johnny
my .02 cents