1 week with my NEW Expert Pro 440!

[hardcore]

Just to expand on my very short reply there; the impact sources and cables have on the sound are nowhere near as profound as the impact good setup can make. Case in point; put a $20,000.- cable between your amp and speakers and turn your speakers to face the wall. It'll sound like crap. Now change that 20k cable for some lamp cord and set your speakers up properly. It can sound absolutely fantastic, with probably only a very small gain to be had by introducing 'better' cables. 

This is a bit of an extreme example but what it does explain is how little there is actually wrong with lamp cord and how much improvement can be made by speaker set up and let's not forget listening position either.

Sure, the room and speaker / listener setup are important. Especially with a new speaker and figuring out how that plays with the room.

Cables are more like later stage tweaks. But I was specifically suggesting trying the RCA-XLR master-companion link, not because of the 'quality' of the cable but the galvanic isolation that the XLR input provides. I suspect that's why it sounds quite different from the RCA-RCA connection.