any suggestions for a speaker cable around £5 metre to use from a n-vi to my mks

Chord Carnival Silver Plus is a good neutral cable. It's a bugger to make up so get the dealer to do it. It's not a small cable so you may want to go with something smaller such as Carnival for the rears.

Of course, neither of these are really what you should be using with an n-Vi and M&Ks. the Silver Plus is excellent value, but you should really be looking at Naim cable, Chord Rumour and Odyssey, all of which give more resolution.

thanks for the reply frank, at the moment have only been using qed micro speaker cable, so what your saying is unless i spend quite a bit more for the cable i.e. like you suggest, i might as well keep the micro cable for a while. john

The micro cable is great from a surround point of view because it's just so small, but the downsides to micro is that it is quite restricted in resolution and drive. It just doesn't get going. I also find it a touch mechanical.

Going to any of the cables I suggested will bring about improvements in different ways. If you want to do things one thing at a time, start with the main front speakers, then the centre and lastly the rears. Either use the same cable across the front (same lengths too, even for the centre) or use a 'better' cable for the centre for best results in surround sound. Do not go 'worse' on the centre. It unbalances the soundscape in a destructive fashion.

Incidentally, you're not getting the benefit from the system that you should be getting. The cost of the cables is quite low compared to what you've spent so far. The difference going to the right cables is quite big so I would look to do this sooner rather than later if possible.

have bought some chord carnival for the time being, needed to run the cable to the rears so we can lay the flooring, my plasma is not wall mounted so i can change the front cables in the near future.