What percentage do you spend on each component?

Well I'm here to skew the numbers for you all.

SCAD player: 11%
pre-amp: 6%
amps: 15%
speakers: 14%
cables/conditioning: 49%
tweaks: 5%

Oh,yeah. I forgot to put in power conditioning. I have a large solar power generation system that keeps a large battery bank charged for all my daily uses, including my audio system. None of my stuff runs off of street power, since I'm not hooked up to the power pole. I provide all my own electricity. My entire audio system, except the CD player, runs off 12vdc batteries. No grunge, no RF, no ripple, no step-down transformers, no rectifiers, and no power failures. Just flat clean DC power. And no power bill, either.

Does this count toward my audio system budget percentage? If so, I am pushing 50% for power conditioning, and my system cost just jumped to about $25K.

Here's what I ended up with:

Speakers: 20.8%
Amps: 30.7%
Preamp: 16.4%
Transport/DAC: 3.9%
Cables: 20.6%
- I/Cs
- pwr cords
Misc: 7.5%
-pwr condr
-triphazers
-bybee spur

This was an interesting exercise in that I have not looked at my system breakdown in such a manner. Some observations: I maybe a little light on the transport/DAC components (Is that's why I want a new transport?..any suggestions in the up to $3.5K range??) Also, I maybe a little heavy on the cables expenditures.

Ken

I purposely left out power conditioning as a component since people with a setup like TWL will move the averages quite a bit. I guess we might want to include PCs in the calculation though. For me that's only about 1%. I want to add up the numbers when we're done and see, on average, where people have spent the most money.

cabling 30% (valhalla/quattro-fil)
Speakers 21% (eidolon)
turntabl 13% (basis 2500/ruby2/gram 2.2)
amp 10% (ayre v1x)
pre 5% (bat vk5i)
cdp 7% (full bore audiomod scd1)
computer 5% (custom hd record/playback)
phonosta 3% (pass ono)
cassette 0% (aiwa-a consumer reports best buy in its day)

Speakers are the most important component since they define the voice characteristic of the system. They also determine what amps and to an extent cabling to use. You can get cheaper speakers (like magnepan 1.6's or 3.2's ) that perform at a very high level so cost isn't that closely related. My cabling bill is ridiculous.