Two questions about....?

Get the best gear you can afford that suits your financial comfort level.

You can gradually change your cables overtime to see how much difference they make in improving your gear.

Let the pummeling of my opinion begin...

I second that opinion - definitely the gear is far more important.

Yep, cables are like 5% of the sound. Focus on the system components first, and then upgrade your cables over time as you find good deals. Or never, if you're happy with the sound of your system as it is.

IMO, people who hear vast differences between cables hear those differences because their system is not well grounded. As they change interconnects, they are changing the ground potential between system components. So save yourself a ton of money, properly ground your system, buy decent, but not expensive cables, and enjoy the music.

Dan

There is one thing about cables that I am fairly sure of, that is if you have a power amp that draws a lot of current then a bigger PC will improve the sound. This was the case with my MF M3 when I replaced the stock cord with a considerably larger one. Otherwise, I would say that PCs do make a difference but they are HIGHLY system specific.

You could think about it this way also:

Take a SoundDesign stereo and replace the speaker cables with Transparent Opus. It will still sound like a cheap amp and bad speakers.

Take midrange components and speakers (Rotel/paradigm/PSB/Arcam/Rega) and hook them up with lamp cord. It will always sound better than the Sounddesign.

"You could think about it this way also:

Take a SoundDesign stereo and replace the speaker cables with Transparent Opus. It will still sound like a cheap amp and bad speakers.

Take midrange components and speakers (Rotel/paradigm/PSB/Arcam/Rega) and hook them up with lamp cord. It will always sound better than the Sounddesign"

Love the analogy.
Joe

Entrope and Learsfool are right as far as I am concerned. You will not improve a mediocre system with even the most highly acclaimed wiring. In a really state of the art system however, cables do matter much more than one might think. They can make or break a system if you strive to come as close as possible to the real thing in your own home. It is however devilishly difficult to make the right choices. More often than not, it is not the most expensive, but - if your gear is tweaked right - the most neutral wiring and to achieve that, you have to critically assess even the solder joints, which often enough, even in highly appraised material, are unsatisfactory in the sense that metal is not touching metal and the whole thing is sloppily drowned in solder.