Power cords or power conditioner

Gonna agree with some and and offer some of my experience.

1) As above, first thing is to experiment with speaker placement.  Definitely do this, take a couple of hours and test out different positions, separations etc to get a feel for how it changes things in your room.

2) Get hold of a Puritan PSM156 on demo or sale and return. Brilliant piece of kit.  Will add clarity first, then image second in my experience.  A reasonable priced bit of kit.  Try out the ultimate power cable supplying it too if you can, although std cable is no slouch.

3)  Ultimate upgrade for stereo image is Fo.Q TA-102 thick tape.  Open up your source equipment and apply squares of it to the top of every cap you can find.  An exceptionally cheap upgrade that will by far give you what you want.  Given the budget you are considering, this will give you what you want almost for free.  Try it, its on ebay or lotususa do it I think too (https://www.lotusgroupusa.com/foq.html)

@markiew Thanks for the tip on the TA-102 tape! I’ll give it a try!

The Shinyata Triton and Alpha XC PC arrived today. I’m going to let it play for a while before I have an opinion on it. But so far I do think it is an improvement.

I also contacted the Cable Company on power cord choices. They asked what else I was running. They said my DYI cords are fine for now. But they did not like my combo of interconnects and speaker cables. They said the two couldn’t be more different and the synergy between them was probably poor. So I have some new cables on the way.

@thyname I was checking out GK Acoustics today. I like their products better than Acoustimac, that is where I have bought my treatments in the past.

They are entirely different and they both serve useful purposes.

A conditioner makes certain the power is as clean as possible.

Power cords are shielded to reduce contamination of equipment that results from AC emissions.

@wheelndeal1099 I find it interesting that TheCableCo found Transparent speaker cables and Nordost USB interconnects (not familiar with Wireworld). I’ve demo’d Nordost USB cords before and found them to be quite neutral. Not a personal fan of Transparent speaker cables (I’ve tried them), but I can’t say they are bad. Just not my thing, in my system. But I can’t think of why that combo would elicit such a strong reaction from TheCableCo. Did they explain this at all? Anyone else have experience with this combo?  What are they sending you?

Hopefully you are trying a 1.5m or longer USB cord (as I mentioned I found 1m and in particular shorter than 1m cords compress the soundstage).

@nyev I did't order a new USB cable.  That one is going to have to wait.   This is what was said to me regarding my signal cables. 

"My advice would be to bypass power cord auditions for now and try a loom of a brand that has a more balanced approach than the split personality you're running now. Nordost is all about speed, transparency and leading edge transients. Transparent blunts all of that, rounds off the edges and warms things up. However, these two together don't make anywhere near as balanced a whole as you might hope and I'd encourage you to consider listening to signal cables instead. You've got to get the signal side right before you start playing with the power side."
 

I ended up ordering an Acoustic Zen Silver Reference II XLR, and Acoustic Zen Hologram II speaker cables- Bi-Wired.  Nice thing with The Cable Company is if I don't like the sound, I can swap for something else.  However I've read a lot of people say how well both Luxman and KEF sound with this combo.   I'll soon find out.