Rayhall, I fully agree with your philosophy of looking for neutrality. However, in my experience there are no "speakers which [are] generally quite neutral", even if you spend tens of thousands of dollars. I believe speakers are the most subjective decision, because they all make big mistakes, and you have the pick which mistakes are less important to you (and which virtues are most important). With regards to Jim's crude comment hinting I am using drugs ( I don't think he was referring to the Nearfield Pipedream speakers), I maintain that if you are chosing between reasonably designed solid state amps in a certain price bracket the differences between them constitute "fine tuning" a system. Actually, what I did omit was that the more revealing your speakers are, the more important that "fine tuning" will be. I would agree that with the best speakers around, the upstream decision (amp + front end) is close to 50% of the end result. But this applies only to very revealing speakers (e.g. Avalon Eidolons, SoundLabs, etc.). But in most cases speakers are easily 75% of the sound (again, if the rest of the components are reasonably good, OK ?). In fact, I believe many dealers advise you to pick speakers last because that ensures you are sucked into a never ending upgarde spiral. So there.
