You're right to be skeptical about anything in the audio industry. The decades-long tide of absolute snake oil is massive and it is toxic. Additionally, you're

You're right to be skeptical about anything in the audio industry. The decades-long tide of absolute snake oil is massive and it is toxic. Additionally, you're absolutely correct about diminishing returns being an extremely real thing in audio land. But for hobbiest applications, which is better? For the purposes of this reply, I'm defining "correct" sound as "low in distortion, with good dispersion characteristics -- ie the sound remains the same over a wide listening angle" There has been some pretty decent randomized research from Toole, Olive, etc. that both trained and untrained listeners have a preference for correct sound. It is something that nearly everybody enjoys more, even if they don't know why. In the sense that most people who like butter would enjoy high-quality, grass-fed butter more than they would enjoy the cheapest possible stuff, even if they didn't give a whit about where the butter came from. For sound... as with any engineering challenge, it's always going to be a tug of war between desirable characteristics such as price, size, power consumption, sound quality, how loud it gets, etc. Anyway. If you're building some kind of portable boombox - I highly doubt the extra performance provided by ICEpower would be worth the premium. If you're listening to something at home in a decent listening environment... then maybe it would be worth it. Even a quiet room is going to have a noise floor of like 40+ dB. However, at the end of the day, the speakers themselves make the biggest difference.