Rate these on order of importance:

5, 4, 1, 2, 3

These "arguments" where some turn to extreme examples of really bad pieces of gear are absurd. Of course you can find things so flawed that they ruin the whole chain of events. That is not the question!

People who really know what happens when you try to reproduce music know the two most limiting items are the recording microphone and the speaker.

No amount of pre speaker manipulation, and I have as flexible a "front end" with my Z Systems equalization as anyone, can make an inaccurate speaker accurate, or a bad recording sound right.

If your room is reflecting sound waves in a flawed manner, no amount of front end or amp switching can fix it, unless you are lucky enough to stumble on a piece which has a particular drop off of frequency to compensate for the particular anomaly in your situation, and that makes that piece right for only you and your room. (Not for advice on a forum.)

Charlie

Marco, I'll be the first one to say that we haven't found measurment techniques that can truly identify the complete listening experience, especialy speakers. As compelling as they are, I didn't mean for my "argument" to be soley based around those specs. The point was that unless you believe that all the other components all share the the same deviations, speakers/rooms demonstrate the greatest variablity in the audio chain. I think that holds true whether you want to measure it or not. As for your choice of systems, I think a better comparison would be "Close-N'- Play" through "Unsound's Reference" vs. "Albert Porter's front end-rig through the "Close-N'-Play's built in speaker. How about we make it real. While I would never actually recommend this, but, what the heck were playing here. Albert's front-end rig through your choice of new $200 speakers vs. my choice of $200 CD player through my choice of new speakers that cost the same as Albert's front-end rig. I'll take the latter. Thanks, but, you can keep the ear plugs.

Do we have match? If Rsbeck is just stuttering, Abe_av might be in agreement. 12 days and 62 posts later.

Unsound, don't have to wait for that long I say I agree with you right now :-))))

The two major signal conversions in the audio play back systems are: medium to electrical (CD/LP --> analog signal) and electrical to mechanical (speakers). It is the latter that is most difficult to be made right and most relevant to the receipants--our ears.

Abe