I've been building my system for over 20 years. I have a multitude of tweks which cost very little to a hell of a lot. "Fringe" tweaks such as power cords, very high end cabling and power filtering make bigger improvments after getting the foundation of the system first established. By foundation I mean great speakers and a synergistically matched amplifier. A great front end be it vinyl, digital or both and a preamo that is transparant and matches the amp very well. No that you have that harmony and very revealing components you will more than likely hear the changes made by $1200 meter interconnects, $2000+ speaker wires and $1000 power cords. Someone mentioned a $50 K system earlier and it will be a system in that range that if properly matched, set up and in a good room will allow just about any footer, cable change, digital cable change, power cord change etc. to ring through. Now if you add something to that well matched expensive system and it isn't heard then I would believe that the newly added piece is not of much value. It is very clear that these changes are more apparent in the more revealing systems. my system is a work of love and passion and is carefulls tweaked, laid out and maintained. I am at the point that I am now seing value to adding $1200 meter interconnects, $3000 speaker wires and $2000 Shunyata Hydra power conditioners with jaw dropping changes. On a Pioneer receiver based system running rat shack 16 ga copper wire from a cheap sony CD player I dont think any of this stuff would matter. I don't even think it will make a significant difference with stuff on the lower end of mid fi seperates. I used to have some adcom gear and I could hear some benifits from power conditioning, interconnects and speaker sire changes but they were spewing forth from $5000 Unity Audio Fountain head Sognature speakers so I already had some quality speakers and a very good amp to make them sing. So the morale of my ramblings is that a transparent system will reveal mor of the tweaks than one this is less so.
Fred
Fred