More than half of the % of S.Q.
In my experience.... And this is true for all system at any cost...
Speakers cannot replace the room controls and dac and amplifiers cannot replace speakers quality, nevermind their cost....
For me they is 2 groups in audio: electronical piece of gear fetishist and people who know that what is essential is controls of the environment in the 3 dimensions: vibrations, electrical noise floor and especially acoustic...
It’s important to understand that sound quality comes from the quality of the noise floor of a room or space and the isolation and quality of isolation for the equipment and the parts therein. The dynamic range and the intricate subtleties in it are available for humans to peruse via the quality of the noise floor, not from how loud the equipment can inherently play vs it’s given native noise floor (pre noise isolation vs after isolation) and and listing space acoustic qualities, and so on.
"This speaker goes to 125db peaks!" is a meaningless specification if they can’t also improve the dynamic range that occurs without the rise of masking noise/distortion.
Dropping a set of klipschorns in a noisy and untreated room that had, lets say.. a set of simple two ways prior... will not give any more audio quality. It will just make the peaks louder and saturated with more untamed follow-up interfering noise -past the initial transients.
This may (and does) create a different human realized distortion and noise pattern for the listener... but it will not fix or improve anything.
Removing masking noise via improving acoustics is the most critical thing a person can do to improve the observed sound quality of an audio system.
And that requires research, lots of research and work and thoughtful application to the specific case at hand - as acoustics is not a simple problem. Otherwise we’d all have it down to a fine science and all be observing it’s correct effective use in our own systems. Note that we are not.
The next problem is that the sonic character realized in the listening space will then change.. and one might then realize that some or many of the equipment choices were wrong, as their focus, design, and overall aims in creating signal, are literally backwards (screechy over emphasized/distorted highs and transients, to try and outshout the noise!) as they were designed for poorly treated and realized acoustical spaces.
Places where, in the final analysis, people were and are listing almost backward from where they should be. Listening for sharp exaggerated peaks (with inherent long noise tails--which mask fine detail) instead of listening into the noise floor. Like trying to locate the origin and expressive character of a sharp transient gunshot and it's envelope of decay and echo.. over the din of noise from a crowd. If the crowd shut the heck up this would be quite easy. Instead it is difficult and takes time to discern just the peak alone over all the noise going on. never mind the decay and echo tail.
the data shows this to be true in that that one can gather any given 5 or so out of hundreds of various advertised ’revealing’ pieces of audio gear... and the resulting sytem will inherently screech in a very unlikable and unlistenable manner.
Yet this specification of being ’revealing’, in some ways, notably defines a goodly portion the aim of mainstream high end audio.
Correct acoustics is key in properly done high end audio rooms. then one can set about chasing the right gear to couple to that space. As the proper fidelity can finally be heard and realized in the correct acoustical space.
It’s generally a case of half steps in each direction, over and over until it is zeroed in. Everyone learns at a different pace and in their own personal ways, so it’s not a one size fits all equation in the getting there even if the aim is a 100% definable singular real thing.
All roads lead to Rome... but everyone gets their own road, if they can realize the road exists and needs be traveled.
Importantly, the pressure loading pattern in the human ear also affects how the cila bend back and recognize signal. The pressure distortion of noise patterns in the ear retards the act of detail recognition right in the actual signal loading in the ear. this involves the noise floor of the room and how it decays and removes that noise before it reaches the ear. Remove the disturbance and recognize nuance in the signal.