Sound quality impact - preamp vs power amp?

I agree wih the JCP guy, let's sell all our expenses, great sounding stuff, and buy crap that sounds horrible and leave our petty problems behind😉

A little story of my progress through Hi-Fi land...

When I was a kid in the early 1960’s my family had a mono Columbia "HiFi Console." It had a 12 inch woofer, midrange and electrostatic tweeter! A 10 watt mono amp and a record changer. It was very state of the art in 1958 when my father bought it. I would rate its HiFi grade around 80 points. It had real bass and could fill a room with wonderful mono sound.

One day my dad replaced the original record changer (and its ceramic cartridges) with a Dual 1215 turntable with a Sure M91. He also added a small booster amp to bring the M91 output level up to the correct voltage. It was an unbelievable change! Like washing the windows in an old house. I will never forget he put on Simon and Garfunkel playing Scarborough Fair/Canticle. That was my first taste of what an upgrade could do. I would rate that around 90 points.

I have been an audiophile for 55 years if you assume I started with that record player when I was 6 years old. I have worked in the industry in numerous capacities and was even the weekend manager for the AR listening room in Grand Central Station from 1973 to 1976 when it closed.

I owned and or touched lots of equipment over the years. I built and sold super high end systems for many years before moving to the computer software business.

I know this has been said many times before - The week link in any system will ruin the entire thing. Take a $50,000.00 system and feed it low quality source and it will sound like a big awful system.

Assuming you have fantastic source material, I would think the power amp would be more important than the pre-amp. Think about it, how often have you ever seen a pre-amp clip?

I have owned many pre-amps in my days. I have only been able to "hear" the difference in pre-amps on the most fabulous systems. The differences were very "subtle."

In my personal opinion, a preamp works like a music conductor. I have both Aesthetix Eclipse and Atma-sphere MP-1. Both are excellent preamp but have totally different presentation of the music. It's like listening to Bernstein or Karajan in comparison.

The week link in any system will ruin the entire thing.

Yes but be patient, it can only take so much and so at 2 weeks the link breaks.

Take a $50,000.00 system and feed it low quality source and it will sound like a big awful system.

Actually it will sound like a big awful recording. A friend who is really into the Rolling Stones loaned me a whole bunch of their CDs. Until then I always thought Springsteen was the king of great music crap recording but no, its Mick. 

A truly awesome system has the ability to recreate a whole new world. Its not the system's job to sound awesome. Its the system's job to sound like whatever world is on the recording. Whether it be a magnificent concert hall, a magnificent recording studio, or a magnificent 1968 Ford pickup. Don't know why anyone would want that, but there it was. In all its glory. 6x9 coax. Green vinyl dash. With a crack in it.