This was more of a “do you generally prefer speakers with covers or not?”. If you like them like they are choose the second option, if you’d prefer to have a cover choose the first one

It normally has noticeably better imaging from my experience, I had to build a player by myself to match it (I don’t know if there already were players that do that, I didn’t find any and so many people I know)

Actually probably not power cords, but the cables the analog signal passes through actually make a difference from my experience. Same for higher quality streamers (don’t know about 300k but…)

have you tried toeing them to be pointing behind you?