Speakers and amplifiers show audiophiles are confused.

I once bought a Parasound amp and called the manufacturer for speaker recommendations. Richard Schram (owner) spent about 20 min with me discussing the speakers they use at shows, what he uses, etc. Great experience.

@ghdprentice Was your pinky sticking out while you were writing that response?  We are contemporaries but I have never been satisfied with constraints.  Live music lives and breaths dynamics…tea totaling doesn’t quite do it for me.  Whether it’s Shostakovich’s 5th or Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, I need to feel it and connect to it …it’s a contact sport baby!

op you are going about this the  wrong way amps have a personality so do speakers 

some amps are warmer some are brighter you have to listen

we have two amplifiers in our shop both are 300 watt class ab one sels foe 13k the othe 22k they dont sound the same

your best bet is doing research on electronics in your price range reading reviews that describe how the electronics sound not measure

our rule of thumb bright speakers require warmer electronics while warmer speakers require brighter electronics

our advice after 40 years 

1 select the speakers first 

2 match the electronics to the speakers 

3 flavor by choosing source components dacs and cd players also have a personality r2r dacs are generally softer in the top end akm ess more detail

burr browns also tend towards wamth

then choose cables power conditioning to tune sound further and of course trt the room for slap echo and first order reflection types 

Dave and Troy

Audio intellect nj

40 year hifi veterans

@onhwy61 Exactly, I don't know how to pair components especially speakers/crossovers and amps (not talking about powered systems). How do you do it with some sort of objective rigor. 

@yyzsantabarbara "Figure out the room", to do that properly you need your system in there first, sure there will be mechanical acoustical principles you can guess at in the room but really if you want a first class system you need to know the dispersion of your speakers at what frequencies and how they play together in your room at least. I know something about that I wrote some of the first sound ray tracing math algorithms for JBL 30 years ago today it's still impossible to get ray tracing exactly right after the first and second reflections there are to many variables. 

@hilde45 I'm not trolling, It's embarrassing to know that no other groups besides religious cults step out in such absolute ignorance for something so important and expensive. No one can listen to even a fraction of the combinations of high end systems. There are no objective ways to pair components because generally they aren't made for each other. If they were (speakers and amps) at least we could trust the past design of the company and engineering team that produced the system to have some consistency, not component interaction but system interaction. I'm very serious.

Look at it this way if audiophiles did have objective ways of knowing how to pair audio components then one of you smart people would say here it is a, b, c, d...if you cold get what you want when you spend loads of money on a very high end system you wouldn't have to swap equipment as much it wouldn't be a sport, on the forums.

If we were making an app for audiophile equipment paring what would the variables be?

@ghdprentice I think you're right and put your pinky finger on the problem. Ultimately recording studios don't record and mix music in the same way, have the same quality of engineers, and don't have the same budgets to make a foundation for recorded music to be evaluated on the same level anyway. With this in mind the best system should be the most natural sounding with the most headroom to accommodate different genres. I recorded audio for 35 years and I had to fight producers to allow me to do a better job recording their musicians and actors. To them -better- equals more money in production less money for me, this is true at any level of production. A good system should be able to play classical marches and smoky jazz with equal quality.