On a lark (a hundred bucks to satisfy my own curiousity), I bought a few Xangsane power cables. "Silver Plated", massive, very well constructed. These aren't clones or gray market over stocks. Just cables made and marketed by a Chinese company. Their advertising was replete with all the cool buzzwords about materials used, etc.
Upon receipt, they sounded absolutely terrible. Not subtle. Worse than any OEM PC I own. So bad, that I took one completely apart. Nothing surprising. While I cannot confirm the materials used were as advertised, it was still seemingly very well built.
It did confirm to me that PCs matter (If a PC can make something sound better, then conversely, a PC can make it sound worse).
This is not to say they were a rip-off, or to generalize about Chinese products being bad. But I would say are but they aren't necessarily the low cost, low risk path to audio nirvana.
Now I know.