After owning very large horn speakers for 36 years, all speakers especially horns are extremely dependent on amplifiers and room acoustics.
A solid state amplifier will make my horns sound very forward (minimal to no sound stage), harsh, and loud. High Negative Feedback (NFB) amps will make them sound thin, two dimensional, like cardboard, and all the life sucked out of them. Honky. Yes. Honky.
A good SET valve/tube amplifier (sometimes a good SS amp too) will make them not sound honky and 3D to the point where more than one musician asked, "Do you have additional speakers 20 or 30 feet beyond the walls?"
Most amps suffer the James Webb telescope effect, i.e. the amps are more visible and subject to showing their idle noise, e.g. tube rush, rectifier hash, transformer hum, etc. Some highly touted amplifiers sound like crap because the noise at idle or during low-level classical music passages make them unusable. Sad really.
Someone said, "Why can't the world make a good 5w SET amp?" Most amps are noisy with 105dB sensitivity transducers. The same amps sound glorious on speakers that are only 96dB. Problem? Yes. There is a lot of content missing.
How so? From a pro musician listening to 105dB speakers, "I thought i knew this recording? I guess I did not. I'm hearing nuances and notes, that I did not know were there." Same musician, same recording, on my 90dB ESLs, "Okay. Now I don't hear those nuance and notes. I am missing a lot of the recording."
James Webb vs Mount Palomar. Both good, but both different. The first views the beginning of time. The second views the visible universe.
I own two systems. One is sensitive low power and the other is insensitive high current. Some recordings are better suited for one or the other. Perfect systems do not exist--only different.
I have not even covered room acoustics. You can treat a room, but remember that you are only "fooling your ears" into thinking that the room is fixed. It is not. The bad acoustics still exist. You just cannot hear them, because they are filtered out.
The master composers wrote music for churches, because they had high > 56 ft./71m. Why? No standing waves at 20hz. They had calculus back then too. :)
