When a budget speaker is preferred to a high end one...

Yes this exact situation happened to me. I had an mv55 Conrad Johnson tube amp. I sounded glorious with my JM Labs Daline 2.1's, which were limited range speakers that went down to about 40 hertz. I put the mv55 on a pair of Wilson wp7s and heard a lot of grunge which made me think that Wilson's weren't so good. I asked the dealer who had let me do this experiment what was happening and he said that the amp was producing lower quality sound in the deep basd and that the Wilsons were now reproducing that where my JMLabs weren't.

So I don't know about better or worse,  but if you have full range speakers you have to have higher quality electronics in the entire chain leading to it.

Lets not forget the people who buy audio for presentation and appearance purposes. These are not really audiophiles, gearheards or luvers of music. They want other people to think or perceive they have the best possible audio system. Period. I think these people make up a slim slice of the overall pie, and they will pay a very high inflated price for speakers for that purpose.

Twice I have invested in a major speaker upgrade only to "build" thre rest of my system around them.  The good news is thst with each susequent upgrade the speakers sounded better and better.  I guess this is a testament to system and room matching.  No speaker can sound great regardless of room or what it is being fed.  

This is why my trusty Monitor Audio Silvers haven't been shown the door yet.  They just work so darned well.  I demo'd an SF Olympica with an MC452 driving it and was totally underwhelmed.  I come back to my system is far from broken, and have one of the rare moments where I don't want to tinker.  I do want to square off some sort of Klipsch vs. Zu on my upstairs system though.  

@theaudioamp @hilde45 @juanmanuelfangioii @akg_ca 

Thank you for your appreciation. Helps me continue to put my positive energy into these responses  :)