Kclone,
I understand where you are coming from. I also started down the same path: buying the most expensive components I could afford, changing to the latest cables which magazine reviewers claimed to be the best thing since sliced bread......and then all of the sudden I started taking notice of the kind of world I was living in: $4,000.00 "Power-cords", $90 fuses, resistance compensating speaker cables and all the snake oil marketing, which has no real basis or foundation in science and engineering; so possessing advance degrees in both physics and electrical engineering, I said to myself this is all nonsense. Surely we should be able to manipulate all spatial and the musical presentation's parameters through electrical means, signal-processing?????? I then dove deep into the mastering world and discovered that studios DO posses such tools, signal processors to manipulate every aspect of the playback's presentation. Unfortunately, there is no free lunch as the top quality mastering gear is also extremely expensive, but you get away from the "blind" audiophile exercises to "known", predictable, repeatable, defeat-able and scale-able exercises. Let's just say that it's a great world. Haven you ever stopped and wondered why a remastered version of a recording can accomplish so much more than component swaps, and certainly more than gold fuses and $5K power-cords? Just think of the K2, XRCD, XRCD2, XRCD24 and K2HD remasters. Don't you wish you could do the same for any recording at home? Again, this is not plug and play like the component, cable swapping merry-go-around, as it does require you to know what the knobs and switches actually do and what effect they have on the recording; analogous to "anybody can get behind the wheel of a formula-1 race car, but only some one who knows what he has in front of him and knows how to use it will get the most out of it.
Onhwy61's recommendations are a good place to start.
