Speakers The single most critical component

ALL speakers are colored, have the highest levels of distortion of all components by a LARGE margin


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Finally after 40 years of testing, thinking, pondering, yes agree,
Speakers will be the most critical component. There are so many box/xover speakers that will ruin even a  $100k Jadis set up or any other $100k set up of your own choice. Mine just happened to be Jadis. That said, as i mentioned above several times. Richard Gray lent me  2 of his loan amps, while the Defy was undergoing new Caps/new resistors, new internal wires.
The Dyanco ST50 and his Allan Organ monos, both were very close to the $9k/new Defy7. 
= a  KT88 = almost any other KT88. Although that is a blanket statement. There are some tube designs that just <<got it wrong>>, 
Point  is, you do not need to worry about amplification, nor much of source, phoono is superior to cd for sure, however most of my classical is not found on LP, so now i addeda  phono and have started collecting some  classical(Pettersson symphonies) which i also have the cd as well.
Glad a  few discerning audiophiles can help me out in this  heated debate. 
There are so many speakers of the box/xover design when used with any tube amplification, which  will drastically lower the purity and fidelity of the source. 
Hopefully after we close this topic, my 2 mantras will plant seeds in newbies minds  which decades later will take root.
1) speakers are the single critical component
2) FR are the King of all speaker designs
3) compression TI Horns are the king of all tweets added to a  FR
I can not even give away the Thors right now, like most xover/box designs they just sit on various sites as if in a  junk yard. 
You will rarely, if EVER finda  <<Used FR>> on the market. Snaped up in less than 1 week, at near full price. 
I rest my case.

Let the debate going on please....We will keep the thread .... 😊

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If we do not openly, freely , with civility discuss this speaker  issue, how will we ever get to the bottom of things?
Agree, let the discussion continue. 
I can tell you as of now, my mind is as shut /closed even more so than my worship of the Thors, which now i hate with a passion, although i could have sworn in my YT uploads these were <,Nirvana>> THen a  single 6.5 FR , like David, slew the Goliath. 
Now i am a  devotee  of only 1 speaker design, FR/Compression combo. 
Nothing from Troels Gravesen's lab could even remotely change my mind. 
I  was indoctrinated into the old school, now i am a  awakened believer.

db efficiency
Efficacy, affectivity, effect. 
all this comes into play when employing a speaker with any tube amplifier.
Not only SET amplifiers , also push pull requires if not demands, if to say <match made in heaven>  has to be paired with a  FR driver. 
This is physics.
Its not rocket science. 
Its common sense. 
Employing any speaker of the old school box/xover design you are severely compromising the life of a  tube and  crippling the tubes ability to perform as it was designed to perform. 
We were born and raised on box/xover designs, now its time to leave that all behind us, as we enter the 21st century audiophile cosmos. 

@mahgister --

The room is the cake, you must design a room with all the passive and active acoustical controls necessary to help your speakers...

I would go so far to say the room is certainly part of the cake as the main dish - in conjunction with the speakers, that is. The predominant focus on acoustics potentially fails to take into account their being relative to the speakers and their dispersive nature. That is, below the Schroeder frequency (seeing the room here as a resonator) a multitude of bass sources is the acoustic measure to at least partially alleviate the need for absorbers/bass traps/PEQ, while above the Schroeder frequency narrower dispersive characteristics from the likes of line sources, large coned drivers and horns will limit the influence of the room.

That is to say: generally speaking a smaller, direct radiating coned speaker will be more dependent on acoustic measures, or certainly for the listening room to natively better suit it for it to perform closer to its fuller potential, compared to earlier mentioned more narrowly dispersive, larger speakers.

My listening room is on the livelier side of neutral, and the recent addition of a (much) larger MF/HF Constant Directivity horn (replacing its smaller CD horn sibling) - controlling dispersion better and also lower in frequency - has seen a welcome indifference to the acoustics at higher SPL’s in particular; the sound is now more focused, physical, relaxed and better saturated.

My main gripe with absorption (in contrast to diffusion) is that used too extensively it simply kills the soundstage and natural life of the presentation. Indeed, usually I find the fine line here to be easily crossed with just a limited amount of absorption. That’s why earlier I left the acoustics of my listening room on the slightly livelier side, a compromise for sure, whereas now (with the bigger horns) it feels closer to being ideal.

The predominant focus on acoustics potentially fails to take into account their being relative to the speakers and their dispersive nature. That is, below the Schroeder frequency (seeing the room here as a resonator) a multitude of bass sources is the acoustic measure to at least partially alleviate the need for absorbers/bass traps/PEQ, while above the Schroeder frequency narrower dispersive characteristics from the likes of line sources, large coned drivers and horns will limit the influence of the room.

You remark is sound and wise....😊
😁
BUT you forget something not me.....

You forgot that the room is not ONLY AND MAINLY made of directions where the waves bounce on the 6 walls but if the room is like you said a resonator, the room is constituted by different pressure zones, and these zones are modified in my small room by a grid of 32 resonators which i used like a "mechanical equalizer"...( by the way the cost is zero because it is recycled pipes and tubes and straws)

Then this tool which is not less powerful than the passive material treatment and complement it, constitute what i called an active control of the room...

---Passive material treatment: reflection-absorption-diffusion in balance..

--- Active control: distributed finely tuned resonators which work with the wavefronts coming from each speaker to each ear in a precise timing treshold that will produce not only imaging and a better soundstage but more importantly a "listener envelopment" Or LEV experience which is the sensation when timing of the frontwaves are under control to be in the room where are the musician and not the musicians being in your room...For example, in some recording the voices of the singers come from behind me and the orchestra sound come from the opposite wall where are the speakers, then i am in the midst of the opera scene....In active control i used also a grid of connected Schumann generators with success they contribute but less powerfully than my "mechanical equalizer"....

Give me any relatively good speakers and i will be happy AFTER my installment of acoustic control not before ....

The room is way more important than the speakers, if they are relatively good one to begins with for sure.... Like my Tannoy was or my actual Mission Cyrus....It is unbelievable but this is my experience...

Because most people have never experience it and will never experience it, this will stay unbelievable...

We never listen to our speakers, we listen to our room, EVEN in nearfield listening, contrary to a false belief in audio threads...

The sound waves speed made them crossing my 13 square feet "bad" room 80 times in one second.... Meditate about this....And our brain work in approx. 80 millisecond treshold slices to create the sound 3-d presence impression correlating each ear first frontwaves cues with one another....

This is the meditation about this fact that inspired me to create my "mechanical equalizer" after reading some acoustical paper research about timing thresholds importance for the LEV experience...

No speakers, nevermind his specs sheets, could replace by only itself  the room controls for the sound recreation in all characteristic,  natural timbre experience, imaging, lev, asw, soundstage etc.... 

Most people ignoring this speak about speakers like they speak about "tastes".... This is only ignorance of acoustic....