Here's why amps can be more important than speaker

If you drive your amp hard, distortion will be worse than the spec you see on the paper. Those are measured by a constant resistance load, I think, and the signal level they measured are of course at easy power level (which makes numbers looking good). But for real application, amp drives real speakers at pretty high power/current level. The speakers are much tuffer load, depending on frequency and their own distortions are not small even at easy power level. In engineer's words, both are working at nonlinear regions, and those numbers measured at more linear level (lower current and linear load) do not mean much in real life listening. You can use those numbers as reference but should not trust them more than your ears.
I would trust those spec's on digital equippments more, those are more linear devices, 0 or 1, and you can't lie about how many bits they are and what sampling frequency is.
If they can provide more inf on jittering noise then that would be a good judgement of transport on paper. The only problem is when it gets down to DAC and output state, analog parts come in and the nonlinear effects kick in again.

That's why some people like over-powered amp than under-powered your amp. The amp will be more in linear region if your power amp is capable of higher current and power than the speaker's demand. If under powered(you can call it bad match), even a good speaker can't perform. If having enough power or up, a good speaker is much better than bad ones.

Hi,
If you worry about amp blowing up your speakers, add some fuses for speakers. But in normal condition, it seldom happen unless someone accidentally turn the volume close to max. Human ears can take so much dB, and most of speaker would be too loud for you to bear if you turn the volume too high. A short trasient of bang of music will not generate enough heat/energy to blow speaker in listening level.
Someone here also pointed out in Audiogon before: many speakers were blew because receiver's power rating is too low (especially true for transistor amp). A transistor CKT is more likely voltage-limiting. When input signal is too large a sine wave, it will drive output CKT to srong nonlinear region (engineer call it saturation). The result is a sine wave in becomes a square wave out(in voltage). A sharp coner of square voltage wave will create a huge spark of current in inductor load. In this case, speaker is in dangerous of clipping or even blew up. On the hand tube amp is usually more close to current limiting(in this case voltage will overshoot), which is safer to the speaker. But nothing is free(evergy is conservative), energy will burn your power tube not speakers, the result is shorter tube life.
I am not encourging people to use 1000W amp on a 30W speakers, but at least give it 30W to make it a fair game when you do comparison.