Which link is most important?

smaller signal is more vulnarable to the wire quality so the cd-to-pre is the right decision.
if you have Sam Ash music store near you i would suggest to pick up canare japanese cables for the price of RadioShack wires or even cheaper with absolutely great performance comparable with budget AudioQuest interconnects such as SideWinder.

"All things being equal", if you use more than a CD player, putting your best cable between the preamp and power amp will improve the performance of every component plugged into the preamp. CD players tend to picky on cable choice from my experience, so if you are going to demo some cables, try many with your CD player.

For inexpensive cables, you can't do much better than the MAS cables made by Stu Wein of Audioparts (his screen name on Audiogon and eBay). Stu can be contacted through Audiogon and has many cables listed currently. He will custom make cables anyway you want. He has various grades/quality of cables... See this link....

http://cgi.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/search2.pl?seller&zzAudioparts

T-guy: I agree. But since there's only one set of IC, I thought the improvement (one way or another) would be more noticeable if the experiement was conducted in the order I recommended. Cheers!

I don't agree with Gregm completely, I always found better results working upstream and flowing down, i.e. start at the source and go to the pre THEN go from pre to amp, what's lost can never be regained and for that matter any coloration added between the CD player and the pre will be amplified through the pre- one sure way to find out is to listen yourself :)

Yes, DO get a reasonably priced IC (or, DIY -- you can search archives here on the subject), at least one. Try the one you have now b/ween pre-power first, then b/ween source & pre -- & choose, as Socrates suggests.

I would suggest these:

http://www.outlawaudio.com//products/cables_about.html

At $35 each, or 3 pair for $90 you can't beat them for the price, a whole lot of cable for the money, I'd take them over many $100plus ICs I've heard....

Where it my system, in the interm I would go to Target and buy a set of "RCA" brand shielded IC's for about $10 a 6' pair. Getting rid of the IC that came with your VCR for a shielded IC will be a dramatic change even in a modest system.

As to where to put your one good IC on, why not just try both locations and see what works best for your ears, you are the only one that has to listen to it, afterall....