Well, I'll tell you cats, recently I've been doing some experimenting with cables, and I must say that so far my system hasn't fallen prey to snake oil-type claims; quite the opposite.

Not too long ago, I acquired a Totem Acoustic Mite speaker as a center, and the clarity and soundstage bumped up when I bi-wired it. Then I replaced some Kimber 4PR speaker cables with a 9 AWG Kimber 8VS and some 10 AWG SignalCable Ultras (for my longer runs). It noticeably bumped up again.

The latest (and probably final) tweak? A 1.5m pair of brand new Audience Maestro interconnects that I found dirt cheap on Audiogon (wouldn't have been able to afford them otherwise). They're running from my CD out, and since my center/monoblock/passive preamp configuration is driven by different interconnects I decided that it would be easiest to detect any shift if I ran just two channels for the time being. Guess what? These Audience ICs clearly enhance the sound in two-channel mode (the fullness almost matches the center), and now that I know Audience has a re-termination service that allows you to split, say, a pair of 2m cables into four 1m lengths, I'm going to do that in order to re-outfit my mono center-channel configuration. The best thing is that, even with the re-termination fees, the five interconnects are going to cost less than half the price of five new Audience Maestro ICs. I'll post again after the process is completed and burned-in just in case anyone's interested.