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?

Iirc the tubes on the radiators should always be at the top