Most important component??

Glad ya'll enjoyed the crystal ball thing.

Avguygeorge, sorry but a dishonest clerk who works in a Nigerian bank already beat you to it.

Well Rives it looks like you are no longer a lone voice crying in the (correctly damped and highly diffuse) wilderness. Just for the record, folks, a couple of years ago I spent a few minutes in the Rives room at CES and the sound in there was magnificent - especially for such a small room (1/2 of a St. Tropez "mini-suite" - maybe, I dunno, 12 by 18 or so). It had a big-room richness that totally belied its modest dimensions. The Avalon monitors in there were obviously a very good match to the room.

Duke

Let me consult my crystal ball. Close your eyes and concentrate...

Instead of individual components, I see component pairings.

The loudspeaker-room pairing looks like the most important, as this is where there is the greatest variation.

Next, depending on what speakers you decide work well in your room, the loudspeaker-amplifier combo may well be the next most important pairing. In some cases, it's appropriate to consider the speaker wire as part of this combination, but not always.

If the loudspeaker isn't all that particular about what amplification is driving it, then the preamp-amp pairing is probably the second most important.

After that, my crystal ball gets too cloudy for me to see clearly what comes next.

Slip me another twenty dollar bill and it will probably come back into focus...

Duke
dealer/manufacturer