mixing brands

The secret to making cable selection easy is to properly match your components. Get that right, and its far more likely that you will be able to use one brand. If you need to use cables to fix problems that you didn't take care of by selecting the right components, its just endless trial and error.

In your situation, if you put your system together right, and just can't afford to do all of your cables at once, by all means mix them. If you like the sound of the new cables better than the old ones, your system should sound better with each new cable you swap out.

I don't remember the brands I use at all. Definitely on speakers I have Kimber 4tc unterminated on both ends.
Interconnects are mostly pro-audio XLR Mogami gold/silver

I have a lot of experience with Nordost as a system and combined with other brands. (Although the last was before the "2" of the Norse and Valhalla range came out)

If your plan is to change to another brand I would certainly change the speaker cables first.

In most or almost all cases I had Nordost ic's worked fine with other brands of speaker cables but combining their speaker cables with other brands of interconnects did not work fine for me in all but a few cases.

Both Kimber and Nordost make cables at all price points.

My small Proac Tablette-based system is a full Kimber loom.

My Harbeth-based system is slowly working towards a full Nordost loom.

In both cases, I am using the budget lines and getting very good and even sounding results.

Kimber plays nicely with lots of other brands but as above I would say Nordost works best with certain brands (in my case Atlas and VHD) rather than others (Cardas and Transparent).

Barto. Thank you that makes good sense. I'm using Nordost ice now testing with diff cables and they seem fine thanks again

Banerjba, I'm snob and don't want to spend over $100 per pair of speaker or patch cables. Any Nordost cables(speaker or IC) below $100 per pair? Termination is optional for speaker wire.

Nothing for $100 from Nordost and the speaker wire is fairly pricey, even used.

At your price point, Audioquest has good options or buy used budget Kimber.

I know. I use Kimber unterminated 4TC for speakers. I've got remaining 8' of wire for $50 unterminated so having 4' runs per each speaker. When I had RCA unbalanced components I used AudioQuest Topaz.

Most of my system is solid core AQ stuff bought used…Type 8 speaker, Cobra and Diamondback ICs…silver digital…and it all works really well together like a swarm of disparate bungee cords.