Sometimes I wonder if people deeply steeped in this hobby haven't studied the trees for so long that they forgot they're in a forest.
Given all the variety in speakers, space demands, and people's tastes, any speaker could be a bottleneck in the wrong room to the wrong person. I'm always surprised how much emphasis people put on gear upstream of the amp. Everything behind the speakers has but one simple job: to drive a load. The amp by far has the roughest job.
Good sources are nice, but no source will make up for a speaker that cannot behave as required according to space and tastes. The speaker has to at least be capable of performing the desired task. The amp must be capable of driving the speaker to it's potential. The rest of the chain just needs to do it's simple job well and drive a fairly benign resistive, maybe mildly capacitive, load. I'm not sure any shortcoming between a source and pre-amp could compare to the shortcomings possible between speakers and an amp.
Given all the variety in speakers, space demands, and people's tastes, any speaker could be a bottleneck in the wrong room to the wrong person. I'm always surprised how much emphasis people put on gear upstream of the amp. Everything behind the speakers has but one simple job: to drive a load. The amp by far has the roughest job.
Good sources are nice, but no source will make up for a speaker that cannot behave as required according to space and tastes. The speaker has to at least be capable of performing the desired task. The amp must be capable of driving the speaker to it's potential. The rest of the chain just needs to do it's simple job well and drive a fairly benign resistive, maybe mildly capacitive, load. I'm not sure any shortcoming between a source and pre-amp could compare to the shortcomings possible between speakers and an amp.

