Do you belong more to souce first or to speakers first school of thought ?


It is more complicated in reality of high end than either/or but still we have our preferences. This is a never ending debate, so let's never end it.

inna

The point is that with poor speakers your high end source may still sound poor and you won't hear the full benefit of your source. However with high end speakers which match your room you will hear the best your source can produce, good or not so good! 

Everything matters but speakers shouldn't be the weakest link in your system. 

Hence speakers first.

A great source OR speakers will STILL sound mediocre with a so so amplifier driving them!
I'll take a GREAT amp driving a decent source & speakers,allowing the FULL potential of those items to be realized!!!

Actually, there are people advocating amp or preamp/amp first approach. I understand them, especially if they talk tube equipment.

I look at speakers as the macro part of my system while the source/front end I consider to be micro. I found it much harder to find speakers that worked for me sonically, plus large heavy speakers are much harder to move around than front end equipment, when using the buy and try approach .

Once I found speakers that ticked my boxes sonically, and partnered appropriate amplifiers to drive them, the (heaviest to lift) macro portion of my sound was complete. Most here have at least adequate source components so it is not a matter of having great speakers and sucky source components. Once the source is mostly ok, upgrades to the source IME tend to be micro, or smaller incremental gains. In addition, digital source gear has experienced noticeable improvements almost annually over the past 5-10 years so my source has been the least stable part of my system, as I have upgraded DACs, servers, added a DDC, etc., and the more stable part of my system (amplifiers/speakers) seems to have kept up.