Rate these on order of importance:

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"

Marco, I was all excited about the opportunity to defend my position, but I think you said everything I would have wanted to say.

Once the signal has arrived at the speaker nothing can be done to improve it. Lots can be done to prevent the room from destroying what you have worked so hard and spent so much money on for all this time.

No system will sound great in a poor quality room. As Marco mentioned, it is critical to put together both a good system and a good room. The issue I have is that it seems many people put together good and often expensive systems but set them up in a room that is not worthy of the system.

I think this is the issue often times when someone says I heard ______ speakers and they sounded like @#$%! Or I heard this amp and it sounded terrible, when someone else heard it in another room and thought it was the best.

I really don't believe there are two systems anywhere that sound the same, because they are in two different rooms. The room is critical to the sound of a good system.