Most important link: Source? Pre-amp?or?

I have to agree with the speaker/room interface. This is most noticeable when you listen to speaker's at a dealers soundroom then at home, they hardly ever sound the same and most of the time worse provided that your dealer has a well treated room. I have been struggling with this problem while trying to incorporate a high end stereo system into a home theater for an all in one approach. I can tell you I failed miserably and will be splitting up the home theater in to 2 seperate systems. The problem was the room I was using for home theater, since it is the same room we normally entertain in acoustically treating it does not pass the girlfriends muster and mine as well. It sucks the bass out like a hoover so much so that I must use 3 subs to attain the bass response for home theater and it has terrible reflections that rob the music of it's imaging and sound stage. I have a room upstairs that I will be setting up my 2 channel rig, without any treatment it sounds about 35% better than my room downstairs and I plan on doing some room treatment to make it even better. I am just hoping that the impending room correction devices form Meridian and Perpetual Tech deliver on there promises so we can all rejoice in getting closer to removing the room from the equation.

I agree that the speaker/room interface is the most important aspect of a HiFi system. but now we have another tool to tackle this problem : digital correction by using DSP boxes beetwen the CD transport and the Converter . this is the future ! i got fantastic results with the following : Digital signal coming from a goldmund 36+ into an upsampler Weiss SCF2 (to 24/96 khz) then correction of the speaker/room interface with a Weiss equalizer (working at 24/96 in digital) then upsampling to 192khz with a DCS 972 and finally converting into analog with the DCS Elgar. I do not think it is possible to get better. olivier

I agree with Bob Harley: the source components are the most important.

This scenario requires a certain premise to be valid, that being that the components considered (room included) are of relatively good quality (defining this is of course an endeavor unto itself). All things being equal, it is obvious that the SOURCE will make or break a system, and it is where the "lion's share" of the budget should go, IMHO. Garbage in, garbage out, as the "flat-earthers" say.

I believe the most important links are at the beginning and the end of the chain. I agree with anyone who says the room is the most important factor, but I also believe that the media (LP, CD, Tape) is important. A terrible recording can't be helped by changing equipment. During the oil "crisis" of the mid 70's, many LPs were released which sounded horrible. Thery were full of imbedded pops and clicks and the surface noise was very high (Virgin and Atco/Atlantic are two labels which come to mind). We were told that the records were made thinner to conserve resources. I still have some of those records and they sound terrible on any system they are played on. Look at the time and effort some labels spend to make terrific sounding albums. These companies realize, as was mentioned above, garbage in, garbage out.