What's most important?

Robert...i understand your point! However, we have to first follow some logic here! Before we buy furniture, a rug, HI-FI! We have to have a "space", and that is dedicated, or not, room! Are all rooms built with four walls, ceiling and floor? Yes or no? The size of the room should determine what kind of amplification and ultimately what kind of speakers will be best suited for! For example, rectangular room 20'x 15' moderately furnished (not cluttered)will be perfectly suited for medium-low amplification with large monitors or two-way floorstander! Anything larger, and you will probably run into some problems! Vandersteen are good speakers, but as i understand they do "pump-out" large amount of low freq. And you need relatively large room to enjoy the full potential. Regards!

My idea was that, AFTER the fact, we know (assume) which sistem will be suited for our "environment" that THAN, we build our sistem around the PRE-amp, and not the speakers! Regards! P>S> refer to R. Harley's book, and new "THE INNER Ear" where is interesting article on importance of pre-amp! Dragan

Anyone that has not invested a great amount of time into optimizing the speaker / room interface has never heard the rest of the system do ANYWHERE near what it is capable of. Choosing the right speakers for ones' room, listening tastes, listening position and their placement will affect more things than any other component !!! We are talking about boomy bass, thin bass, "hot" treble, dull treble, pinched mids, forward mids, lack of imaging, too narrow of a sweet spot, shallow soundstage, too deep of a soundstage, too narrow of a soundstage, etc... ALL of these things are addressable via speaker selection and room interface. Selecting the right speakers and then properly placing them is half the battle. Applying the proper and NECESSARY room & acoustic treatments is another 10%. What other SINGLE aspect of the system can make or break things so drastically as the speaker to room interface ? NONE. Sean >

I would concur with speaker/room interface being the single most important factor, and would only add that this further implies that, among the individual components, speakers are the most crucial. However, I'd have to add a few conditions to that. . .First of all, this assumes that one is at using at least decent "upper-mid-fi" components. There's no point "proving" that the source component is not the most critical by playing, say, a Wadia (pick your ultra-high-end brand of choice) CD player through to a $99 boom box (my old Sony has the inputs). Nor do I think the latest, expertly setup Linn-SME-vdHul (again, pick your favorites) analogue system will give much joy played through, say, my first system, which was a Dynaco 40 wpc solid state integrated amp and a pair of Dynaco A-25s. But if you played the analogue setup I had in that old system -- Thorens TD-160 with Shure V15-III -- through that Dynaco into a pair of really fine speakers -- for me, horn-loaded Tannoys or modded Altec 604-8Gs -- that were properly set up in a compatible room, that would be best of all. Of course, adding a better component will make an improvement. Once, when out of work for a time, I had to sell my Tannoys. I used the other components (including a big Crown/SAE combo) and a small pair of bookshelf speakers that I had long since retired, but weren't really worth selling. I was amazed at how good they sounded with the separates compared to the Dynaco I'd used them with before. A very real, obvious and delightful difference, to be sure. Having said that, in my experience, among the components themselves, speakers are the main contender. To put it another way: I imagine someone gives me one signed blank cheque and another for $3000, and says, "Buy a five-piece stereo system (analogue rig, tuner, CD player, preamp, power amp) plus speakers. For one component you may spend as much as you want. But $600 each (or, for the speakers, a pair) is the limit for the other components. I know I'd fill in the blank cheque to buy the best (for me) possible speakers and then spend $600 each on the source components and the amplification.

while i agree that speaker/room interface is critical, as far as how much one *spends* on their set-up's individual components being important, i tink it has a lot to do w/what one's main source is. if cd is the main source, then i think one should devote their money on getting the best pre-amp possible - decent lower-cost speakers can interface w/any given room, and the law of diminishing returns really applies strongly when talking about digital playback: ie: a $20k cd system is really going to be only marginally better than a $2k cd system. ie: i'd rather have a $20k preamp w/a $2k cd player than vice-versa. better to spend the extra $$$ on a preamp, imo. however, w/vinyl, there *is* a greater return for investment when getting more expensive playback components. more important than the preamp? i dunno, but certainly much closer in importance than w/cd. i think it's important to realise that linn, when stressing the importance of the source, made their initial comments prior to the advent of cd... doug