Speakers first, and also speakers last.
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@br3098 +1 Yes, speakers matter the most! |
@tweak1 true! But…the speakers and the amp are the biggest contributors to the final presentation (let’s assume room acoustics are decent here) and you will never know what your speakers are capable of without the best possible amplifier driving them. |
The true source has always been the recording, not necessarily what it's being played on, even though that does matter but is secondary to the recording itself. My 60 years experience dictates recording and speakers. Getting the room/speaker interface right will yield the best sound with the smallest investment. |
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+1 to thinking of Systems rather than individual components. Some people need to think of speakers first. If filling a room with sound at high levels is important, perhaps speakers have to be the first consideration On the other hand, speakers can’t reproduce what’s not there in the first place. Worse, high resolution speakers can reveal any sonic shortcomings in the source. People that prefer vocal and acoustic music for which tonal quality and being able to hear environment cues might be better suited to finding source components that can better convey these aspects of music that are difficult to reproduce well.
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Also it doesn’t matter if your source ends up being multiples in price of your speakers. You don’t have to buy a top line speaker to match, as often the top speaker model has a half dozen drivers and is designed for a cavernous listening space and requires very high wattage amps, which if not setup carefully can reduce it's performance to below that of the middle tier models (which are much cheaper). |
Speakers and amps start to get very competent around 7-10k. You can triple that price and only get a different flavor of sound. My advice is now find a speaker with a sound you like, then go to the moon on the source. Not just the DAC, but grounding, power distribution, streamer, equipment isolation, cables, e.t.c, can reveal a sound that you never thought possible from your speakers. If you just had a normal equipment chain, good speakers can be ALMOST there, but there is always something unsatisfying. So you end up on the speaker merry go round (and amplifier merry go round). When you ignore the dac/grounding/power/cables chain, you never really heard what those speakers (or amp) were capable of. I can now see this is the situation most audiophiles are in, including myself until about 10 years ago. |
@mitch2 this is a reasonable way to look at the source versus speakers question. In my main system, I shopped very carefully for the amp and speakers that met specific criteria I had for my room for both two and multiple channel uses (macro). I have not felt a strong desire to replace those and have focused instead on improving sources and tweaking cables (micro). Improving sources in this system have allowed me to get the most enjoyment out of my “macro” gear, and finally cure the upgrade bug. In my office system I have more modest amplification and speakers, but did not get the full benefits of what they had to offer until I placed a proper DAC in the chain. In both cases, my systems were source limited, crap in, crap out. One last comment, the performance envelope of budget speakers and DACs have improved significantly over the last decade. If you can live with more pedestrian looks, you can get pretty high audio enjoyment for modest outlays of cash these days. Achieving the last 10-20% of performance requires significantly greater investment, and probably should start with the listening room and power supply. kn |
I look at speakers as the macro part of my system while the source/front end I consider to be micro. I found it much harder to find speakers that worked for me sonically, plus large heavy speakers are much harder to move around than front end equipment, when using the buy and try approach . Once I found speakers that ticked my boxes sonically, and partnered appropriate amplifiers to drive them, the (heaviest to lift) macro portion of my sound was complete. Most here have at least adequate source components so it is not a matter of having great speakers and sucky source components. Once the source is mostly ok, upgrades to the source IME tend to be micro, or smaller incremental gains. In addition, digital source gear has experienced noticeable improvements almost annually over the past 5-10 years so my source has been the least stable part of my system, as I have upgraded DACs, servers, added a DDC, etc., and the more stable part of my system (amplifiers/speakers) seems to have kept up. |
The point is that with poor speakers your high end source may still sound poor and you won't hear the full benefit of your source. However with high end speakers which match your room you will hear the best your source can produce, good or not so good! Everything matters but speakers shouldn't be the weakest link in your system. Hence speakers first. |
That's certainly true, generally speaking, but first it is not always easy to determine the weakest link, and then by changing any component your change the overall balance, so you might upgrade but not get better sound or improve some aspects of the sound and make others worse. This is a form of art, I would say. In my case, I think I know that the weakest links are cartridge and speakers, though they are not weak links, so I have no need to upgrade, only a moderate wish. |
I’ve evolved LOL. Came back into the hobby through the angle of folks repurposing vintage pro audio as inexpensive high current power. That lead to signal processing but I was driving sub par speakers. Fast forward five years and I’m a speaker devotee luxuriating in the market trend toward big baffle mid fi heritage speakers and fast small subs :) |
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Both. Both have to be as high of quality, for the least $ possible. Thats my philosophy. I Sell gear, so I have hundreds of pieces. I regularly switch out components to upgrade and try different combinations. I have 3 racks: 1. a complete ADCOM rack in my basement shop - hooked to cornwalls and Bozaks 302’s. Due to size of speaks-i dont change this at all. 2. bedroom rack: Dynaco pas3x/ST70 combo & Yamaha MX830/CX1000 preamp; ads1230's & CalRad's 12" coaxials (amazing!); Onkyo C-7030; Tice conditioner; Akai digital tuner; Cambridge Black Magic 100 DAC; BT unit 3. downstairs BR/music room: Yanaha M80 & dbx BX-3(badass!!) amps; new to me: parasound pre 200; Onkyo C-7030; Yamaha T-1020 tuner, Akai TT w/Ortofon cart; Furman power conditioner; BT unit; Yamaha T-80 tuner; JBL L88 plus 12's w/brand new blue diagonal foam rubber covers that repacesd the orange quadrax & Monitor Audio Gold bookshelves. Note: Onkyo C-7030 cd players with the Wolfson dacs are the best sounding and most dependable 'mortal man money' models there are. I collect them when i find them for $150 or less. I have 6 or 7 currently. If you haven't experienced one, you need to. They are the only cd unit i use. |
Another +1 (or more) to @atmasphere ! |
Very true! 😎 Mike |
I was just browsing through the amps and preamps forums, and came across this from @atmasphere
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Speakers first. Buy the best speaker you can afford to match the room. Buy source with the remaining budget. This will give you the best sound from whatever your source may be. Then go on to upgrade the source and other components to match the speakers. Once speakers and source matched upgrade the speakers and start again! |
Speakers first, always. Only you have your ears, specific musical preferences in what sounds good and the environment they will live in. |
Ahhhh . . . I should have known. |
@immatthewj I was being sarcastic. I can't count these 0s. |
@grislybutter (do you miss being called "Brown Bear"?), I suppose one could interpret that as 30k for the speakers (wow, I wish I could do that!) and then "the rest" would entail all of the electronics, speaker cables, interconnect cables, fuses, power cords, and all else assorted what-have-you one might deem necessary that is in front of the speakers. One might even include room treatments as part of "the rest," although in the context of this thread, I realize that was not part of the topic. But you know how these threads wander. (I am going to go on record as saying I have personally never tried any exotic fuses, but I am curious.) |
so many here have completely ignored the question. It was NOT what is most important, it was what should come first. Nothing is "most important" because it is a SYSTEM. It is the weakest link idea. The SYSTEM can be no better than the weakest link so again, nothing is the most important. However, we can pick a logical place to start, and that is most definitely with the speakers. They must fit the room and they must be capable of doing what you want them to do i.e. what do you value most because unless you have mega bucks you can’t have everything. You want to play AC/DC at live levels or more interested in string quartets? etc.. Once you have speakers that will be able to do what you want, and that will work in your room, then you can start figuring out what kind of amplification you need to get them to perform, and then you can focus on getting a source that is at least as good as the rest. So once and for all let’s just drop the ridiculous idea that one part of the system is more important than any other
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I’ve done the totals on the MSRPs of what I am actually listening to and I am still under 30k. I’d love to go either way with 30k and 70k. Either way. (I don’t know what it would come to if I added up the stuff that is in a dormant state. There is actually enough dormant to create an extra system with stuff left over.) My electronics up front : speakers ratio is way heavy on the electronics end. At one time I was in the camp that felt good electronics could make average speakers shine and that poor electronics would bring good speakers down. Now I am not so sure about that. (And I realize that good, average and poor are all relative terms.) |
