SPeakers 90% of your sound

If you have garbage speakers:
#$%@ in garbage out for sure.

Sogood51, I'm embarrased by your kind words, especially since I've been so caustic with you in the past. With all humility, thank you.

The Listening Room Part I, Your Most Important Component by David Smith, President And Chief Engineer For Snell Acoustics said "the recording that you paid good money for already has the sonic footprint of that large carefully designed performance space. Your living room doesn't need to add its footprint on top of that. In truth, your living room needs to absorb as much sound as possible. It needs to be acoustically dead."

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/archives/

If your speakers do not reflect improvements made in other areas of your system then your speakers are holding your system back and should be replaced. I agree that speakers account for the largest single part of a system's sound but I wouldn't ascribe more than 50% of the sound of a good system to the speakers.

I think Karls and Rlwainwright are speaking with audio wisdom. Y'all better stop that...

Great responses to all...just a quick clarification...Im not advocating spending 90% of your budget on speakers...just that speakers account for 90%(or so) of your sound(good or bad depending on your means)...so there seems to be 2 camps...for example purposes...in a 2k system...there are those who would allocate roughly $500 for speakers and the rest on source and electronics...and there is the camp that would allocate roughly 1k on speakers and so on...I would fall into the latter group myself...with "midfi" amps and sources gaining much ground on higher end, esoteric products(where cosmetics and build quality often inflate prices)...I would have to agree that the sonic differencs between a $500 amp and a 5k solid state amp are very minute(maybe even non-existent)...these are my findings...