The best answer is that everything in the chain matters. I have been listening lately to a $16K amp with $4K speakers and those speakers sound so much better then they do with lesser amps that it can hardly be overstated. (Not that the $ means everything, but I am finding now that there are many rather expensive amplifiers that have qualities that no far less expensive amplifiers can match.)
In general "the preamp is more important that the amp" is one of the larger audio fallacies around. I'm not sure where it came from. It's flat-out untrue for me over the course of trying dozens of preamp/amp combos.
In general "the preamp is more important that the amp" is one of the larger audio fallacies around. I'm not sure where it came from. It's flat-out untrue for me over the course of trying dozens of preamp/amp combos.