As far as power and electricity goes, it seems that power cables and transformers, etc. outside of your home have a lot to do with the quality of electricity that ultimately is fed into your gear. If your neighborhood has older parts for wires and boxes, then there's only so much you can improve on that in my experience.
And the whole cable issue is completely outrageous. I own a pretty decent system - costing me well over 10K for the components alone. The cables/interconnects were the last thing I upgraded, from the Audioquest $40 jobbies I was using before, to the Cardas Cross/Quadlinks I'm using now. Now I've been into hi-end gear for about 15 years - and I'm not kidding when I say I can't tell the difference, except for the fact that the Cardas look a lot more elegant. A complete placebo effect if you ask me. Try this - ask a friend to hook up your system with sub $50 cables and then with $400+ cables without telling you which was which. If the cable market is correct, you should be able to unequivocally tell the difference 10 out of 10 times, which I'm sure anyone would be hard pressed to do.
And the whole cable issue is completely outrageous. I own a pretty decent system - costing me well over 10K for the components alone. The cables/interconnects were the last thing I upgraded, from the Audioquest $40 jobbies I was using before, to the Cardas Cross/Quadlinks I'm using now. Now I've been into hi-end gear for about 15 years - and I'm not kidding when I say I can't tell the difference, except for the fact that the Cardas look a lot more elegant. A complete placebo effect if you ask me. Try this - ask a friend to hook up your system with sub $50 cables and then with $400+ cables without telling you which was which. If the cable market is correct, you should be able to unequivocally tell the difference 10 out of 10 times, which I'm sure anyone would be hard pressed to do.