Best power cords in the $250-$400 range?

They can sound more restricted, bass is not as full and heavy, you have to try it period... Nobody can prove this with as much tech info as I can Spew here trust me, by the way within these very pages you will find tons of info on running power amps thru too much filtering and going to the wall 9 out of 10 times will render better results, unless you can get into the real big money isolation transformers and things. Again my only point was there is almost no way that plugging in a Power cord of high performance (mainly with the power amp) into a monster unit can be purely working at its best level vs. going into the wall.. Hey unless you have serious electical line issues, with lots of noise or something than the monster is not doing anything positive for the power amp.. However on the flipside it is possible that Digital components can be cleaned up, its all experimentation.

I agree with Undertow and his assessments regarding plugging amps into the Monster Powercenters. I Experimented with a MPC HTS 3500 with a few amps with poor results.

I was always told to start with the amps ac cable first. Since all components work through that anyway. The better your amp is set up, the easier it will be to notice the improvements (and to what extent) made to other components.

Without purchasing new components, speaker wire and amp ac cords are the most cost effective way of getting substantial results one way or the other.

Are we talking car audio here?

Psychicanimal, no actually monster cable makes home units too..