M100 said:
...Would be interested to know how you find the interconnect changes affect things....
I have no desire to open another debate on the merits, or lack thereof, of premium cables, but these are my experiences...
Until I got the AVR300 I used Transparent's High Performance in-wall cable for speakers all around. Once I got the AVR300, I was trimming the treble by about 2 db because of what I thought were room acoustic problems. Three of my room walls are paster on brick, the fourth plaster on lathe. The floor is hardwood with one large desnse wool area rug. i.e. very reflective surfaces.
My dealer loaned me the Transparent MusicWave speaker cable for my fronts, which are several steps up from what I was using. I noticed a difference almost immediately and discovered I could set the speaker EQ back to flat again. I got improved detail, lost some shrillness I had, and got back much of the wamrth I was accustomed to from my Dynaudios in a carpeted room. So now I have the MusicWave cable for the fronts and center permanently.
This weekend I just started auditioning Transparent's Premium digital coax cable for the DVD player (have been using a Transparent 75 ohm composite cable). This seems so far to elminate a lot of distortion. On the DTS R1 Twister, what used to sound like a lot of noise in the storm/tornado effects now sounds far more like howling and groaning high speed winds, and from within all that loudness I can more easily pick out details like the vehicles crashing, trees and houses snapping, etc. In Star Wars I pod race I hear improvements as well, like mechanical sounds that before sounded like ambiguous effect sounds. The initial canon battle scene in Master and Commander is amazing -- I get lots of detail and clarity in the mids and highs that were prviously somewhat shrouded by all the LFE. LFE in general is now less boomy and more detailed, also pretty much solving what I thought has been a room/placement problem. I'm getting ready to try out some of the Jurrasic Park stuff to see how that performs (those dino screams are pretty hard on a system at decent volume and can sound grating, so I wonder if this cable will change things).
On video, I upgraded from the Transparent HP component to the Premium component cable on DVD. As a result, I got deeper blacks and more intense color. I ended up turning contrast down, and brightness up a bit on the TV for better shadow detail, and images took on a more three-dimensional appearence. LOTR almost seems to jump off the screen in some images. Detail and smoothness improved as well. Overall, the cable gave me better film-like quality on DVDs. The gap between DVD and HD material on broadcast/Sat has closed considerably.
Incidently, the AVR300 soundstaging is so good on Twister (DTS 5.1), that the speakers disappear entirely, and it really seems like a tornado is raging all around you, with no gaps in placement around the room. WOW!!!
On satellite, quality is too inconsistent, so I use good cables, but don't bother with premium quality ones.
Dean