SPeakers 90% of your sound

I share this, which plays into Stehno's last comments. I have had B&W N803 speakers for just over a year now; these speakers are well spoken of. For the past year they have sounded good but I was still left wanting; I have used a Levinson No.383 and BAT VK-30/200 with them. I recently purchased a Rowland Concentra II and this has transformed the performance of the N803's. I was selling the N803's, but no longer and I can concur that they can sound very good indeed once paired with the right amp.

Sogood51, I hope your being sarcastic. I haven't put that many systems together, and have made my share of mistakes. Besides my biases may be very different than someone elses.

Phasecorrect-
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I know you've been contributing to Audiogon and perhaps it shows. The components you've been swapping must have all been good quality and well-matched with your system. For sure, a bad or mis-matched component can really mess up the sound and no speaker can fix that. I also agree, as stated above, that swapping components of roughly equal quality will usually not buy much.

I was amazed by the differences in the sound of high-end speakers at the recent HES show. In particular, Joseph, Wilson, Dynaudio and Quad all had vastly different qualities. The first three in particular all had extensive room treatments and I'm sure were vying for "best of show". I've heard that many set-ups also benefitted from Rives' low-freq room treatment device. Each presenter seemed very proud of the sound in their particular room. How can such a collection of high-end speakers sound so different?

I heard the Wilson's in three different rooms and I suppose they were accurate but they cetainly weren't my cup of tea. The Joseph Pearl's were kind of the opposite, they immediatley put me in a comfort zone. The Dynaudio's were simply awesome. The Quads were something completely different.

So I agree with everyone that the components and the room are all critical but the biggest variation has to go to speakers.

Unsound, what I ment is your grasp of the fundamental building blocks along with also understanding system-synergy,room-speaker synergy as your posts state, must always result in good sound no matter the cost.

garbage in, garbage out