Speaker priority: high or low???

Spent plenty of time in the audio business, and I totally disagree with speakers being the most important part in the chain. Maybe they are the most important part of the mid-fi business chain, but not the audio system chain.

I have always been in the "source is most important" camp. I have had excellent results with my systems using that format, and expect to continue in that vein. I definitely consider speakers to be important, but the source is where its at. When you can bring more music into the system, it is amazing what comes out the other end. I would never buy expensive speakers if I didn't already have my source maximized. I, like Squiddy, have had very enjoyable systems where the speakers were quite modest, but the source, and amps, made them play to their maximum capability, and they sounded alot more like high end speakers than many would have believed. I used to back up a pair of Linn Kans with $7500 worth of source/electronics when I lived in an apartment, and believe me, they didn't sound like what you would expect from a $795 pair of mini-monitors.

Cloudgif, if I may jump in here and address your point of "adding" things to the music, my point(and I think Nate's as well) is that the speakers cannot add any more to the musical signal that will create more music. They can add colorations and distortion, and other things, and subtract things also. But they cannot make the musical signal have more integrity and truthfulness, than the signal that they are fed. The best that they can do, is to faithfully reproduce it perfectly, which is almost never the case. But some do an admirable job within their design limitations. Some speakers do a better job than others, and this is where the argument for better speakers is appropriate. But they cannot overcome an earlier loss in the signal chain, no matter how good they are. Therefore, in the order of importance, the earlier components rate higher. You must first get the signal to the speaker in an accurate form, preserving as much of the source info as possible, and amplifiying it properly for your speakers to use. If the proper signal gets to the speakers, and they don't do what they are supposed to do, then it is time for new speakers.

Unsound, my main point was that the source item is responsible for bringing into the system whatever amount of music is going to be played. A better source item can cause more musical information to enter the system. Then, it is up to the amplification chain to preserve as much of that information as possible, while doing the job of amplifying. The speakers are to emit this information as well as possible, given their capabilities and the conditions in the room. My point was not to minimize the importance of speakers, but to point out the importance of the earlier items in the chain, in doing the job needed to make the speakers work at their best. The earlier items, after all, are the things that make the speakers do what they do. Without the earlier items, the speakers could not work at all. Of course, the amp will not work without the speakers either. But, I was not talking about simply losses in the amp chain, I was also referring to the increases of valid musical information that can only be gotten from a better source piece, by retrieving more music from whatever type of disc one might be using. This is what I was meaning by my statements. The speakers can appear to be increasing the information, but the are not really doing that. The better speaker is simply able to reproduce more, and better, of what is already there. But if the source item left the detail info on the disc, there is no hope of reproducing it.