Source or speaker

Let me pile on with Photon46 and disagree with Bob's contention that there's little difference among solid state pieces and among digital pieces. The difference are actually very large.

However, at the lower end of the price range, Bob assertion has more validity.

Dave

From just a distortion perspective, speakers do several orders of magnitude more damage to the signal that decent electronics. Factor in room interaction and it's a no- brainer where the emphasis needs to be.

I quite agree - it is a no brainer really. I would certainly NOT recommend to spend as much money on Interconnects/Cables as on the speakers/room acoustic treatments.

Most speakers have $100 wholesale mass produced drivers - you are paying almost entirely for veneer and cabinet work in most cases. Drivers are what actually makes the sound in many $50K+ systems...yes really... several $100 transducers powered by $1000's of wires and 10's of thousands of dollars of source and amplification.

Imagine if just a little more money went into the quality of the speaker drivers and into room design/acoustics instead...a scary thought.

Shadorne, my rooms have all worked without treatment, every place I've lived since 1969. My rooms tend to be carpeted and relatively stuffed with furniture and of relatively large size, so that mitigates my need to treat somewhat. However, the assumption that every room will need treatment does not jive with my personal experience.

My example earlier in this thread had a speaker investment around $1,000. At that price point you can find some very nice designs that use good, off-the-shelf drivers combined with good cabinet and crossover design. A top echelon $1000 speaker with good electronics will easily reveal weaknesses in the cables, ICs and the source.

I think it was on the Stereophile blog where I recently saw a survey of audiophiles. A very high percentage of those responding say that they have between $5000 and $10000 invested in their systems. That's enough money, like my proposed $5000 system, to put together a really revealing and musically satisfying rig. I think that spending $2500 on speakers for such a system and $100 on wire would be a mistake, yet many people would chose to do that.

Dave

Thanks for your responses, I guess i must be lucky. My speakers are excellent and room interact as well is excellent.
But what's incredible is how my source upgrades (or crossgrades since i went from blackbird to denon 103r) and also adding all that mass to the turntable made such an improvement in performance!!!
I recently heard a bunch of systems avantgardes included and my system trounces on them. The one system I liked was using analog as source and the speakers were verity fidelios. It may have been the combo, shindo was the pre and power amps. Or the gerrard turntable.
I guess the point here is that the whole system needs to be up to the task and synergy too is important!

Go with speakers and then back to sources as necessary. What's the point of thinking differently?