Steve, good luck with the subs, I look forward to hearing how you like them 
Raja, I just bought a tube pre to replace the Adcom. I hope it will work well with the XRS and Trends. I like the Anti-Cable speaker cable the best so far. I tried a couple cat5 wires and 20g magnet wire too, so no extensive testing, but fwiw the AC is cheap, and easily sold if you don't like it. My Anti-Cable IC clones sound VERY close to the actual Anti-ICs at Steve's... of course, I think they're slightly better The biggest difference is silver vs copper, so you'd probably like whichever conductor you happen to prefer. I tested a Cu 8-stranded helical IC which is better than the Anti-ICs with the XRS but not with the Maxhemps. They have great bass and a smooth, rich sound without losing any detail... the Maxhemps prefered the more open, analytical sound of the Anti-ICs and sounded a little plump with the other IC. The differences were quite large and very obvious, you're right that little things make big differences.
Dave
Dave,
I've been biamping my Omega Hemp Dipoles with the Trends. Initially I used 8' Blue Jeans Cables LC-1 IC's with ~18" 14 gauge silver speaker cables. This combo really produced a large soundstage, spooky separation and clarity. Recently, I've been using 3' BJC IC's with 6' 12 gauge magnet wire. This setup produces a thicker more mellow tone but the soundstage has shrunk in width and the separation and clarity have suffered too. Perhaps the magnet wire (Anti-Cable clones) and the new BJC IC's need more break-in time but I doubt that that is the problem. The BJC IC's have very low capacitance so perhaps when I use the long IC's with the short speaker cables this means that the Omegas prefer the low capacitance. On the other hand, the short silver speaker cables some influence too.
Hmm....this is getting confusing.
Maybe I'll try short magnet wire with the long IC's. One problem is that I can only chop my cables so many time before they all become too short.
I only have so much of the silver speaker cable and unfortunately I have already reduced the total length so many times that I can't use it in long lengths necessary for 4 sets to biamp. Today I think that I'll go back to the first comb. I do favor the overall sound quality of the long IC setup.
I'll soon be taking delivery of a battery power supply which means that I'll either have to go with the short IC setup or buy 2 BPS's.
I guess this completes the hijacking of this thread.
