what speakers demand high end electronics

Ahandler I agree with you to a certain point. Some high end speakers are very revealing. If you use those speakers with mediocre electronics the result can be hard for the ears. In such a case some less revealing, more friendly sounding speakers might be better. Speakers that will not let you hear every detail so you will not hear you electronics that well.

I would guess if your speakers allow you to hear the difference between various electronics and cables they would more warrant / demand better upstream.
I have Vandersteen 2Cis with Sunfire pre and power an NAD 541ci cd which are good enough to end up being at the mercy of the recording? Some sound as good as I can imagine they get, at least to my ears, and some music I really love is almost unlistenable because of the poor recording.

Is that as good as a system can get? that the weakest link seems to be the recording?

Most any good speaker will sound its best if matched to the right amp that is also of good quality.

Good quality and high end are not necessarily always the same thing in practice.

Many larger full range speakers require more power to be driven to the max. Generally, getting the right and good quality high power amp needed to drive these will tend to cost more in that it costs more in general to build a good 250 w/ch high current amp than a similar 50 w/ch one.

I believe what Alan Shaw means is that any well designed amp will work. In other words a nice Rega, or Arcam, any competent amp will do. The Harbeths aren't a difficult load. Will the Harbeths sound better will better amps , of course. But they don't need a huge 200 watter, or $10K to get good sound, a good amp will get one going. Fyi I have Harbeth SHL5 driven by a Plinius 9200 works fine. Would a better amp sound better? I'm sure it would but it sounds pretty good with the 9200 :-)

I agree with Mordante. IME, the more revealing the speaker, the higher quality other components in the system need to be for the speaker to sound its best. A less revealing speaker will in effect act as a filter, concealing to some extent the flaws and limitations of upstream components.

I believe that this observation about speakers can be generalized...

Matching a higher resolution upstream component with a lower resolution downstream component will typically yield better results than matching a lower resolution upstream component with a higher resolution downstream component.

Bryon