Rate these on order of importance:

Matchstickman - You're hearing me screaming? Man you must be one of
those underpaid audio reviewers who can hear dog whistles, and gets
annoyed if a mouse farts in the basement during their favorite passage
of Resphigi's Church Windows! I had no idea - we are not worthy (can
you see me bowing deeply at the waste just now?)!!! Everyone knows
you gotta spray the cockroach pizza's with a thick coating of RAID
before you serve em up, otherwise you gotta go running after it every
time you turn the lights on!

As to the A/B test you propose, well, lets just say a certain slogan that
Paul W. Klipsch used to use comes to mind. But I guess that the words
"sound better" are entirely subjective. Herman's spot-on
IMO, the whole concept is more than a bit odd. Why ever would you
want to create a system out of balance, investing disproportionately
more in one component and compromising another. You're investment
in the expensive component would likely be wasted, and or reveal all the
flaws of the lesser component. Balance and synergy is paramount in this
hobby, and in any "system". Also, price alone does not
dictate the quality of a component, nor that components synergy with
another in the chain of similar cost. Given that balance exists, and care
is taken to select components that work well with one and other, I'd
agree with Nrchy's comments about the importance of each of the
individual components, but, as he concludes, a disproportianate
investment in one component over the other is ridiculous.

Marco

Jax2, I merely just asked for the order of importance, in GENERAL terms. I never said anything about price or balance or holding back on this and not spending more on that. Relax.

As for Paul Klipsch, I am not familiar with any of his witty repartee.

By the way, I am underpaid, I do review the audio that I buy, I don't like mice(except with broken backs in a moustrap), and I am not familiar with Resphigi's work, either. Apparently, I need to get out more.

Matchstick - It's all that RAID on my pizza's man...I think it's doing something to me.....I just can't relax anymore!! I gotta stop with the pizza's cause it's driving me nuts. So you're one of the ones putting all those mice in traction just because they fart once in a while!! You know how expensive that kind of care is for a mouse. It's driving their insurance rates sky high and they can't handle it with their tiny mouse salaries. Maybe if you listened to Resphigi more often you could get them to hold in their farts in till those really low passages that rattle your windows. I know, you'd probably still hear them, but have a heart guy, we all fart don't we?!

Marco

Nrchy, If you say that the speakers are the least important BECAUSE the can't reproduce what doesn't get to them, then you can't say that the room is the most important, since it can't reproduce what doesn't get to them either!

I believe Nrchy was inferring that if the information is not retrieved from the source in the first place, or is distorted or colored in a specific way by the source component, nothing you can do down the line is going to alter that. The room, on the other hand will effect anything and everything you present within it's boundries. It can make or break virtually any aspect of stereophonic reproduction/illusion regardless of how great all the remainder of the components in the system are. An extreme example: Stick a well assembled $50K system in a tiled bathroom and you have pretty much wasted $50K.

Marco

PS Paul W. Klipsch's witty reparte I referred to was a button he was fond of wearing, and which he marketed as a promotional tool giveaway. It reflected his feelings about a lot of what is presented as 'fact' within the audio world. It read simply: "Bullshit"