Utter nonsense. A bad speaker sounds bad, period. A cheap amp with a good speaker is far preferable. If you don't think the distortion produced by speakers is troublesome, then you simply don't care what real life sounds like and you have never heard an undistorted speaker. The distortion produced by apseaker does not occur as an ugly noise, but as a coloration - a 50 hz tone is produced as 60 hz, for example. It may not matter to you, but it is everything to me. Speakers and rooms are the real problems nowadays.
Here's why amps can be more important than speaker
I was looking at B&W's site:
You will notice that speaker total harmonic distortion figures tend to be worse than those of amplifiers and it is reasonable to ask why amplifier designers bother to get down to levels of say 0.01% or lower if the speaker is so much worse. The reason is that most of a speaker's distortion is restricted to the lower-order harmonics, whereas amplifiers can readily generate higher-order harmonics that are much more objectionable.
B&W FAQ
You will notice that speaker total harmonic distortion figures tend to be worse than those of amplifiers and it is reasonable to ask why amplifier designers bother to get down to levels of say 0.01% or lower if the speaker is so much worse. The reason is that most of a speaker's distortion is restricted to the lower-order harmonics, whereas amplifiers can readily generate higher-order harmonics that are much more objectionable.
B&W FAQ