Rate these on order of importance:

All things being equal speakers are the least important piece in the equation!

Speakers will never reproduce what doesn't get to them!

1) ROOM

The room is the most important part of your system. Yes it is a part of the system!

A good system in a bad room is not going to sound good! So with that in mind is it still a good system?

2) Nothing down the line will add what the source has failed to collect from the LP/CD/SACD/Cassettte/tuner/8-track, or whatever I missed. It is not possible for the amp, pre-amp, phono stage to know what was missed at the transmission point and replace it later.

3) A good amp/pre-amp combination will loose less of the signal than a poor quality combo. These are probably the source of the greatest signal degradation. All the transistors, capacitors, power supplies, and wires are a loss of signal. Be very careful when selecting these two pieces.

4) The transmission of the signal is huge. It has been said that all cable is crap, but some is less crap than others. I read that here. I think Bob Crump was the source of the quote. Good cable will never degrade the signal as much as the amp/pre-amp combo which is why they are listed where they are. Buy the best cable you can regardless of price. I use Purist exclusively. It is obscenely expensive and worth every penny!!!

5) Speakers are important, but less so than everything listed before. They only reproduce what gets to them. The most important task of a stereo system is to maintain the signal from the source to the speakers. If the system does this well they speakers will sound good.

I am not suggesting buying 'cheap' speakers, what I am saying is that they are not more improtant than any other componant! This idea of spending a disproportionally (50%) large amount of money for them is patently absurd. Speakers reproduce only what they get, they do not add to the signal although poor quality speakers will degrade the sound.

Marco, I was all excited about the opportunity to defend my position, but I think you said everything I would have wanted to say.

Once the signal has arrived at the speaker nothing can be done to improve it. Lots can be done to prevent the room from destroying what you have worked so hard and spent so much money on for all this time.

No system will sound great in a poor quality room. As Marco mentioned, it is critical to put together both a good system and a good room. The issue I have is that it seems many people put together good and often expensive systems but set them up in a room that is not worthy of the system.

I think this is the issue often times when someone says I heard ______ speakers and they sounded like @#$%! Or I heard this amp and it sounded terrible, when someone else heard it in another room and thought it was the best.

I really don't believe there are two systems anywhere that sound the same, because they are in two different rooms. The room is critical to the sound of a good system.

inpepinnovations, I never said anything about using bad speakers. I said that all things being equal, or even close that speakers are the least important.

Many of these threads degenerate into foolishness because of generalizations like that. If a person is dumb enough to put poor quality speakers with their expensive electronics, they get what they deserve!

It is foolish to spend more than 20% of the cost of a system on speakers. They are not by any stretch of the imagination more important than the things in front of them.

I cannot imagine a valid arguement for putting such an emphasis on speakers!!!

Cost is often substituted for quality when making comparisons since the relative value of a product is virtually impossible to determine.

My priority when buying my current system had speakers placed at dead-last in imporatance. Great electronics with okay speakers will sound better than great speakers and okay electronics.

For the 100th time I will state that speakers will never replace what was not retrieved from the source, and then did not survive the trip down the line to the binding posts.

Is it safe to assume that many people (incorrectly) choose speakers as the most important because they are the most flawed piece of gear in the system?

Why would people choose as most important a piece that has least to do with the reproduction of the original signal?

Do speakers retreive the signal from the source? Do the transmit it to the pre-amp? Do they process the signal and output it to the amp? Do they amplify it so it is loud enough to be heard? Do they transmit the signal from the amp to the binding posts?

So they have no effect on the signal until it arrives at the cabinet. How can they be more important than anything ahead of them?

The point is that if the signal can be transfered to the speakers with a fair degree of accuracy that the speakers will have something of quality with which to work.

Garbage in Garbage out! If the signal is so corrupted when it arrives at the speakers, it doesn't matter how good the speakers are, it will not sound good, or should I say correct?!?

If it's only about the music, we'd all have bose acoustic wave machines because sound quality wouldn't matter!