Amp more important than speakers?

When two people are rolling in the mud in the gutter; it's impossible to tell which one is the low life.

From my own experience I would rather own a 2000.00 pair of speakers with a 10k amp then the other way around. I am currently running a front-end setup including TT, phone-pre-pre and amp that cost 19k. The speakers cost around 6k. I was recently at a show where some of the speakers cost over 50k a pair. My modest system sounded better than most of these expensive systems. Audio is really about system matching than anything else. I haven't heard too many really expensive systems that sounded good. I have heard a lot of matched systems that sounded great.

If you check the closest mirror orifice10, the answer will be crystal clear.

LOL

Taters, it sounds like you have a match up that will give you the biggest bang for the buck. Only the "connoisseur's" of good sound realize that when it comes to speakers, "less is more"; meaning a simple design with high quality crossover and drivers.

The music is in the grooves and only a stellar well tuned rig can extract it. This means the bulk of the money has to be spent "upstream". Saying one can send "jive" to the worlds best speakers and they will translate it to music is "jive".

The music leaves the grooves, goes through the cartridge on to the pre and then to the amp. If it's "jive" before it gets to the speakers, it's going to be "jive" coming out of the speakers.

going speakers first, might lock a person into a particular camp and I see that as a sort of drawback.

if you grab a pr of panels because of how they image perhaps, then decide you want to try out an 8 watt 300b amp, it's speaker selling time!

Yes. But that is no different than buying an 8 watt amp and then deciding you want to buy Maggies. Now it's amp selling time! I think you were right when you said that everything matters. That's why it's amp selling time or speaker selling time - because the person was not forward thinking. If they were (and it's not always possible to be) then it would not matter what they bought first as long as they avoided things like big impedance mismatches.

Don't misread this, I certainly do not disagree one bit that the upstream components should be as good as you can get them. And yes, lower end speakers can sound great with higher end amps. But I think some lower end amps really do hit above their weight. Nait 5i, Exposure 2010s2, etc. These can be considered entry level but they definitely aren't bad. Same with their CD player counterparts. I guess your point would be if you go cheap on one part go cheap on the speakers and then try to upgrade those. Again, I'm not sure I'd disagree. Although, if you have resonance issues in a $500 speaker, that won't go away if you use a $20,000 front end. Nor will mismatches with the speaker and room. Surely if this is the case, a speaker change first is in order.

I guess I'm saying there aren't any hard and fast rules. You have to take each situation and evaluate it on it's own merits.