How do you determine how much to spend on speakers

on a SonyES CD player. Don't buy in this BS about DAC's and
spending money on the source. Lemme put it this way. Even a tin-ear can hear the difference between two different speakers, but it requires a golden-ear to supposedly hear differences between good CD players. Retail, my system is around $25K. Of this I have $8k on speakers, $9.5 K on a digital front end, and $7.5 K on amplification. If I had to do it again, I would probably spend $15K on speakers, $10 K on amplification, and probably $2K on the source. So you decide what I think is important

i totally agree with the last post. i defy anyone to conduct a true DBX test for comparably decent CD players. i am not holding my breath.

regardless, there's no question that differences among speakers, amps and preamps are MUCH easier to hear than those among comparable CDPs.

-s2k

S2k- didn't you just say in another thread that you regret selling your meridian 508.24? Whyever for if you can't tell the difference?

About the Sony ES cd players, I couldn't disagree more. Go buy the Cambridge, a NAD, a Phillips, Rotel, Denon, just about anything else. The Xa7ES was fine and used is a good buy, and I even have a very old 508ES that was pretty smooth, but at $500 you're talking XA20ES. I had one for a short while. Maybe it was defective, but it sounded off-pitch, like a 33 1/3 rpm lp spinning at 34 rpm. Very lively and exciting - but not accurate. I don't know how you get a cd player to do that - those guys at Sony are wizards.

Paul

paul: i said "comparable CDPs", meaning within a certain price range. as i also said, i believe that the differences among CDPs under 2k are very difficult to detect unless you have very high resultion stuff. this thread concerns a system with a total value of $5k. while not impossible, it is unlikely that a $5k system will have the resolution for the CDP to matter very much.

S2K: I know of a couple of hardcore objectivist types who claim to have heard differences among CD players in blind tests. However, they would say that the differences are subtle indeed, when they are there at all. There certainly isn't the variation in digital that there was on the analog side (leaving aside companies that intentionally voice their products, for whatever reason).