A new audiophile invited me over to evaluate his rig; I was certainly impressed by the high end names on all his pieces, but what I heard should have sounded much better since he had verifiable gear that I had auditioned in high end salons.
I was leaving town and didn't have time to discover what was wrong, but it certainly wasn't the gear he had purchased.
The only thing I noticed was that he had too many different brands of interconnects. I'm an electronics technician and I make my own interconnects using a top grade wire that has long been unavailable to the public. That happened after people like me bought the wire in bulk, and sold to those who heard about my interconnects through word of mouth. Now that I can't get the wire, that enterprise is dead.
These cable manufacturers have so many different philosophies (ground shield on one end, ground shield on both ends, don't ground shield at all, a floating ground) that when you buy from different manufactures, those different philosophies are bound to collide. Right or wrong, I'm preaching consistency; for your line level interconnects, they should all be from the same place with the same philosophy.