mikelavigne,
'get the speaker choice right and all the rest is trivial.
in my mega buck system, you could plug my phone into my amps and it would still sound awesome. but throw a cheap/average speaker into my system and it would sound....cheap/average.'
Years of experience have demonstrated this salient point to me too time and time again. Cost is not the issue, you could get great results for <$1000 used but getting good speakers will be critical.
The bottleneck in performance, I think, still remains with the loudspeaker.
As Mike said even his phone will give awesome results. I tried something similar with my Sony MP3 player a few years back and was shocked to find the sound indistinguishable from my Marantz KI CD player. A truly shocking moment in my audio experience.
Everything I knew told me that the CD player simply must sound better - yet miraculously they sounded indistinguishable!
I've never had room/electrical supply issues but then maybe others are not so fortunate. I don't know.
Here in the UK there were some who were concerned when the standard 3 pin 240v mains plug began to feature half sleeved safety plastic on the live and neutral pins, but I didn't notice any sonic difference. Nor with switchable wall sockets.
My system over the years improved not via CD player upgrades, nor by amplifier up/downgrades, nor by timewasting cable experiments - it was the speakers that did it. Each and every time. It goes without saying that recordings / masterings mattered too.
In general terms the sound got bigger, the bass went deeper and a sense of greater ease emerged as well as the ability to play louder without the sound becoming intolerably distorted.
Almost every speaker upgrade resulted in the existing pair being replaced by a larger and heavier one. If that tend was to continue I don't think my back could handle another such upgrade.
I definitely will need help next time or have to consider using subs, but I suspect they're probably going to need some muscle in shifting too.
