Which area of components to spend the most $ on? Boy I was wrong all my life!

At the end of the day, the mix of components is constrained by the individual’s budget.

In my case, I fell in love with the sound of Maggies, ending up with 3.6s.  Now this choice led me along a path of finding the amp that matched to my ears.

My original choice Audio Research 150.2 ultimately was under powered at 300 wpc inro 4 ohms.  Decent sound, but lacking the current Maggies crave.  After a journey, I ended up with Mac 501s that bench trst about 750 wpc.  They make the mahhies sing.

Thus, my speaker choice drove the budget on the system by requiring more expensive power.

Believing in synergy, I opted for Mac C220 tube pre amp and am quite satisfied with the combination.

Using percentages, I am in for about 33% for speakers, 40 % for amps, 16% for pre amp, 13 % for CD player.

This just rough numbers and I bought the 501s and C220 used ten years ago.  Funny thing, they are worth more now than back then.

If I had high efficiency speakers, I could have saved a bundle on amps.  That distorts everything.

Yes, I have a DAC, and music server (2) and other toys, but I have described what I believe is the heart of my system to demonstrate one example of how the percentages can be driven by a aingular choice.  

Your choices will drive yours in a different manner, yet neither is a wrong choice.

tlong195880 posts01-15-2019 11:09amYou should spend most of your money on $600 magic mats and $150 vials of magic graphene goo to gunk up everything electrical in your house. That’s the ticket, yeah.
LOL Sounds like you speak from experience.I myself have never.
Who me? I never made mistakes like that. TWEEK TWEEK! 
To this day I still can't get my cable plugs to shine like the ol days.
I realize there should be some tarnish but black?

@whipsaw: Yes, the new CD player costs 8 times more than the older, but again check out the budget breakdown.

• Contour 30 @$7500 + CD 5005 @$500=$8000
• Concerta2 F36 @$2000 + SA11S3 @$4000=$6000.

Speakers are $5500 cheaper, $2000 cheaper combo, SO much better sound!

First find the sound you like. No point trying to get great analogue  sound if you crave digititis. Then allocate by bang per buck. And then, what @almarg said.

You may find that some things give precious little bang for buck in the system you are envisioning. Scrub them until you've optimized everything which gives more value. Start by scrubbing cables or power cords or fuses that cost more than a few bucks. When you have upgraded all those caps to styrene or teflon, all those resistors to nude Vishays, that cartridge to a stone body Koetsu, then, and only then, maybe.

IMO. YMMV.

Let me challenge the majority wisdom here.

Yes, the overall quality is that of the weakest link, yes if the signal starts bad in the beginning can't improve down the link

But those are all qualitative statement. Let me try and put some quantitative in that, albeit subjective I realize.

Thing is that the difference between a mid priced CD or AMP (not to speak of the cables) and a top of the line one is minimal. Say is a 90 vs a 100. While the difference in sound quality between equivalent mid priced or top speakers is like 10 to 100 !

Say that any component degrades to an extent an ideal perfect sound quality of 100.

You start with 100 because you have a perfect CD. But then you have just medium quality speakers that get that down to 50.

Vice versa with a mid priced CD you may start with a 90 but keep it to 90 or 80 because of your top of the line speakers

In other words, yes, the weakest link, ok, but you should look into what component of your chain has the widest influence on sound quality and that would definitely be the speakers.

Industry pushes electronics upgrade because they are easier to swap IMHO.

So my eventual 2 c: spend 90% on speakers, 9% on the fron end and 1% on cables !!!

The opinionated speakers extremist