@Millercarbon --
Sounds like an oxymoron to me, certainly the premise it forms:
What’s to get here, pragmatically speaking, is that the speakers (and acoustics) have always mattered the most to even approach "perfection," and trying to convince oneself we’ve actually accomplished that seems, if anything, unrealistic. Everything may matter to some degree, but certainly not all equally.
When in reality: Imagine the perfect speaker
Sounds like an oxymoron to me, certainly the premise it forms:
... with the perfect speaker the speaker itself no longer matters. It is the components feeding it the signal that matters. Since you cannot hear the speaker then logically the only thing left to hear is the signal, which is running through all these other components.
Do you get it? All these other components are the amp, source, wires. The better the speaker the more these matter. So when you say the speaker is the most important, what you forget to leave out is it is only the most important when it is the worst component.
The better the speaker the less it matters and the more everything else matters.
What’s to get here, pragmatically speaking, is that the speakers (and acoustics) have always mattered the most to even approach "perfection," and trying to convince oneself we’ve actually accomplished that seems, if anything, unrealistic. Everything may matter to some degree, but certainly not all equally.