Howdy,
Cutting cams on a turbo wont give you much of the lumpy idle (I assume thats what you mean by "vicious") as thats caused by valve overlap on an N/A car, you DONT want overlap on a turbo'd car, otherwise you just boost air out the exhaust pipe...
A quick how-to on cams:
Longer lift/Duration on an Inlet cam will yield more "peak" torque higher up the rev range. (more air in = more bang)
Longer lift/Duration on an Exhaust cam will yield more KW higher up the rev range (engine "breathes" better at higher RPM)
Adding an inlet and exhaust cam at the same time will give higher peak KW and Torque and shift the graph higher up the RPM range.
Thats in a nutshell, there are a ton of other factors that will influence the gains (Vtec, Extra runners, Engine "Harmonics" blah blah) but thats the basics...
PS. Your hubby's S14 will have VCT (Variable Cam Timing) on the inlet cam, He will gain mega power on a nice set of cams with the supporting mods....
