A mistake spending too much on amplification?

I'm driving $1,400.00 monitor speakers with $11,000.00 worth of amp/pre-amp. Oh yeah, and $3,450.00 in wires.

Tomryan,

FWIW, IMHO, Assuming that you already have a great amp/pre-amp and source (at that price it most certainly better be good).....then, on your next move towards upgrading, consider to sell you cables and upgrade your speakers. Physical limitations of transducer & box design mean that your speakers and their interaction with the room will always be the weakest link. Speakers improve dramatically above $1500 and again dramatically above about $4000, like anything there are diminishing returns above mega high prices ($10k+), but investing more than twice the amount in wires compared to speakers is quite likely limiting your overall system performance. Wires are wires and it sure is nice to have good wires but, IMHO, lamp cord is 99.9% ok most of the time, and it is what people used for decades until this cable thing became a big market.

Unless you have difficult speakers power amps are relatively unimportant.Preamps are much more important because they bring focus and coherence.
Unfortunately most preamps are crap,and of course you don't come to realise this until you hear a really good one.For me this revelation came in the form of Supratek preamps.
I am currently running a $5000 US Supratek preamp with $400 kit chip power amp-and the sound is far superior to any other combo I have owned or used which contained expensive power amps used with ordinary preamps.[including ARC and Metaxas]

Not sure this is relevant, but I'm driving $1,400.00 monitor speakers with $11,000.00 worth of amp/pre-amp. Oh yeah, and $3,450.00 in wires. The system sounds superb and even though the speakers were supposed to be interim after selling my Harbeths, they're staying for a while.

Tomryan, now I know you've made up the statistics, and you're the only one as for now. That answered my earlier thread on whether anyone had their speaker wires more expensive than the speakers itself. http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?fcabl&1145029415&read&3&4&
Thanks for the tip and now I won't have to feel any remorse over spending 30% the cost of my speakers on wires. And I thought nobody would even touch 50%!!Cheers.

I agree with theabove about preamps, very important as it comes before the amp, also the source comes before the preamp, so it too is important. One of my systems is a vtl2.5 pre/Mac Mc 2751v into a pair of bookshelf B&W cm2(900/pr) fronted by a Linn Ikemi, they sit atop my Khorns, when I play it for people they say "man those Khorns sound great" I say i agree...except they are not on....their jaws drop.

Tweaking of power/inter/spk cables*,AC delivery-filtering-regeneration (very important),isolation products(dampers,cones,feet etc and CD treatments have yielded far more than a component switch in my experience. When the tweaks are done it makes it easier to hear the better piece shine or not if you will. As to a pre if you have sources/amp capable you need to try passive. Just try it. Sometimes less is more. A better power cord on my CDP took away silibance present in vocals. This was after trying several that did not take it away.

ET