High End System Building. How important is the matching, cabling and room? Thoughts ?

I'm using $800 JBL Mini towers with a $20K Aavik u-150 integ......best sound I've had...all about SYNERGY !

@mbmi  , I also believe that the electronics in front of the speakers makes a difference.  By almost every post I have read, over the years I wound up allocating my electronics to speaker ratio funds totally backwards.

@immatthewj i 100% agree with you my system is 25% speakers. 75% electronics! My system is that way and I’m extremely happy   

Make no mistake OP and anyone else - most posters (that I recall?) in this thread did not state (in this thread) that high end sales aim to fleece anyone. I for one don’t generally don’t assume that.

Thats not the same as calling need for respecting the fact that expensive-yet-experimentally unverified kit could set a buyer up to be fleeced. In this era of easy learning, that’s probably more on consumers than designers. I’ve met some audio designers that genuinely perceive differences that I and other hopeful skeptics (experimental design backgrounds) could not. I don’t challenge them in hearing differences, but rather in not being curious (or confident?) enough to properly test detectability of those differences. Make sense? Seems reasonable to me, especially when considerable finances are at stake.
 

Regarding any concern for measurements: stating anything that cannot be measured can also not be heard is unsubstantiated. It suggests over-confidence in current-state test kit and our ability to make accurate inferences from results, often with a complete lack of properly executed and corroborated listener preference studies, and is basically demanding that absence of evidence = evidence of absence (which is often false). That’s no more scientifically sound (pun!) nor experimentally robust than someone swapping cables and proclaiming profound difference has been “proven.”

@calvinj the stumble I find in the discussion of kit synergy is that it is one fully ignorant (or at least exclusive) of any mechanisms for how the process works. Engineering and physics aren’t magic, obviously, so if some kit, namely expensive kit, is functionally “less prone” or “more resilient” to various room effects, great - show evidence of it. Doesn’t have to be (nor likely could be) through gear-driven measurements: it could just as well be human preference score analyses.

What you describe seems to me more blind shots taken at achieving what effective active speakers (many with built in DSP) do through careful engineering, to provide optimal fidelity (= controlled playback characteristics) in a variety of environments. The companies that generate this kind of (active) kit arguably charge more for the tech ingenuity than for the relative cost of production, which I think in principle is exactly how this sort of non-essentials market should work. Arguing that a musical chairs game of expensive separates is, or at least often can produce, the same solution is not accurate and potentially misleading, mostly because success will come from unlikely chance much more than it will come from empirically tested and reproducible modifications through engineering principles. That make sense?

If/when the claims “I have good sound because I use properly matched [high end] equipment” can = “I have good sound after trying many expensive items for years” are interchangeable statements for someone, there probably wasn’t much to the process that was experimentally robust and repeatable among rooms / devices / listeners. Passive speakers with separates upstream aren’t being driven by AI to recognize and modify based on room characteristics. If someone has proper sound from such a setup in a bad room without physical treatment or DSP, it’s most likely because that person (eventually) got lucky.

Which beckons a claim by Napoleon - “I always make my calculations with the assumption that luck is against me.” He would’ve said it in French, but y’all get the idea. 😉

@benanders i totally understand. We had one guy on this thread that repeatedly made the high end fleecing comment.  Most of who spend understand what we are buying. My system works in my not so good room because I bought speakers and components that work well in this environment. The kind of music I listen to also plays a big part.  I just was pushing back on room room room.  Bad equipment in a good room is not good sound either. 

@immatthewj i 100% agree with you my system is 25% speakers. 75% electronics! My system is that way and I’m extremely happy

@calvinj , and I am afraid my electroics $ to speaker $ ratio is even more skewed than that. That is partially because my (25 or 26 year old?) speakers are the 2cond oldest components in my system (my subwoofer being the oldest) and my preamp and CDP are the newest (under 5 years old) so inflation needs to be taken into account, but still. . . . And I truly would like to audition some better speakers. . . .

Anyway, I was going to spare this thread any of my audio anecdotes, but this one is just about how much electronics can make a difference even in a flawed room. Back in the late ’90s I was listening to my present speakers (B&W 805 Matrixes which are stand mounted monitors) using a Cary SLA 70 Signature to drive them with, with a B&K digital HT preamp in front of that, and for the source I was using a Carver CDP as a transport to a Muse Model 2 Dac. (All of that stuff has long since been replaced.) I had a sound that I enjoyed listening to, but I certainly was not getting the sound stage I had read about frequently in Stereophile, and sound stage was something I really wanted more of.

Some time in the late ’90s, the Stereophile cover girl and featured pin up was the Mesa Baron amp (I still have that issue, btw). What a looker. Two monoblocks with six output tubes each in one chassis, meters, switches, knobs, rack handles. . . . Anyway, believe it or not, one of the few local dealers had a demo and he offered me a great trade on my Little Cary, and he let me take it home for the weekend and I was to bring it back on Monday or buy it. His advice was to listen (this is where some of the switches come in) in 1/3 triode and 2/3 pentode.

I got this amp home and set up and hooked up and i WANTED to like it. And I truly did. I typed that I never experienced a sound stage before . . . well . . . I was listening to the Cowboy Junkies a lot back then, and this brought Margo Timmins right up in my face. I became a Leonard Cohen fan through "Natural Born Killers" the same time as I discovered the Junkies, and I still remember his voice sounding more menacing and sardonic and right up in my face than ever before and I enjoyed the experience. And up front and personal and filling the room was pretty much with everything I listened to all day Saturday and Sunday.

However, in addition to being right up front and perhaps adding a sensuous quality to them, vocals sounded sort of husky and musky and it made me think of listening to a music in a room filled with cigarette smoke. But this was unique for me and I was transported somewhere else and I initially liked it.

Sunday night I had just about made up my mind to trade my sweet little Cary in for this behemoth. So the last thing I did before I unhooked the Mesa Baron was to listen to Cowboy Junkies/Sweet Jane (I think I may have listened to both Trinity Sessions and the one and only commercially available, at the time, live version).

Then I hooked my sweet little Cary back up and listened to Sweet Jane again--probably both versions. Wow. The sound stage shrunk to the back wall and around the speakers again, and I wouldn’t call this an A/B because taking amps down and putting amps up and hooking and unhooking wires/cables is a bit time consuming . . . but . . . I had read about a "black background" before, but I never knew what the term truly meant until I heard my sweet little Cary playing Sweet Jane after two days with The Baron. Cymbals shimmering in the air and Margo sounding as if her jaw was clenched on a certain passage. . . . Anyhow, the dealer was not thrilled with my decision, but he took it in stride. However, he did make a comment about "how one gets used to an old shoe. . . ."

The reason I related this aural experience is because I intended it to illustrate the clearly audible differences I heard between electronics using the same speakers in the same flawed room.

Although I still own my sweet little Cary, later on I would pick up a couple of truly dynamic and large sounding ARC VTM120s, a second hand Cary preamp (SLP90) that is my definition of what more musical (than the B&K HT pre) sounds like, and add another piece between my transport and Dac, and then, not due to sound but due to reliability, I would replace the ARCs with a stereo amp that I don’t honestly think sounds better, but I don’t have to worry about getting the soldering iron out when I flip the switches on it. And, as I typed earlier in this long winded reply. within the last four to five years I upgraded my digital front end (I wanted the SACD experience) and the preamp (I had been lusting for the Cary SLP05 for quite some time).

In comparison to the rest of my reply, that last paragraph was quite short. But although the audible impressions the other equipment that I just referred to was not as dramatic as that experience with the Mesa Baron, even in my flawed room with my way less than perfect abused ears, with all my equipment changes I heard differences.

Oh well . . . ramble on. . . .