Replacing stock cables: where to start

Audphile1 - If I didn't address the question my apologies to you and the author of the post. I agree with your statement that you hear what you hear. My advice is to try the cheapest cords you can find of sufficient gauge, test them against any cords that suit your fancy, and do a blind test to eliminate the psychological component of the audition. This will either resolve doubt or save a chunk of change. IMHO.

I'm fussy about my ic's and speaker cables but never found a power cord that sounded any better to me than what you get for $10.00 at Wal-Mart. Your own experience may differ and it is reasonable to assume that it is somewhat dependent upon differences in equipment. A well intended suggestion would be to have some one help you blind test when you start playing with power cords, at the degree of sublety you are dealing with it is easy for psychological factors to overwhelm perception.

Audphile1 - No issues here. I suspect, but don't know, that the reason power cords are not a worthwhile investment to me is your item #2. Most of my equipment has pretty robust filtering, by the time the ac gets all the way to the dc buss it has seen two or three filter networks. If I had equipment designed with sort of the minimalist/purist approach it might well be more sensitive to ac input variance. The other thing that might be hiding power cord effect is that I've got components plugged into line filters, so any gain you get from a cord acting as a bit of a filter network to keep component 1 from creating ac hash for component 2 is probably dealt with in the filter. All that being said, I really do believe that a lot of people would save a lot of money if they would test things in at least a quasi scientific fashion to eliminate hearing what they think they should. Often when you notice that "a veil is lifted and I can hear things I've never heard before" , or some such, it is because you are concentrating more when listening to the new gadget.
Happy Listening!