Colin L
High-tech low-life
From reading the usual suspects on this forum I think the answer to the OP's question is that "nothing matters". Adequate is good enough. I call it the audio nihilist syndrome.
Mains cables, i/c' and speaker cables all sound the same and are irrelevant.
Streamers - any old tat you can knock-up is fully the equal of a purpose built high-end streamer
DAC's - something cheap will do as anything expensive is a con and the marginal benefits are minimal.
Amplifiers - Any competently designed / adequate amplifier is good enough to drive a well designed benign load, and pre-amplifiers, jeez, don't even go there.
It seems all we have left is the speaker and its room interaction (clearly important).
Speakers apart, I disagree with all of the above , but that's just me.
Ive heard a lot of very expensive systems (and lots of cheaper ones too) and the expensively put together high-end system ALWAYS did things that the cheaper ones couldn't do. Scale, density of sound, staging, detail and impact. Many of them were not to my taste.
As an example, I recently bought my end-game speakers and after a couple of months bought the manufacturer recommend i/c's and speaker cables. The difference between them and my well-regarded existing cables was "not subtle".
Mains cables, i/c' and speaker cables all sound the same and are irrelevant.
Streamers - any old tat you can knock-up is fully the equal of a purpose built high-end streamer
DAC's - something cheap will do as anything expensive is a con and the marginal benefits are minimal.
Amplifiers - Any competently designed / adequate amplifier is good enough to drive a well designed benign load, and pre-amplifiers, jeez, don't even go there.
It seems all we have left is the speaker and its room interaction (clearly important).
Speakers apart, I disagree with all of the above , but that's just me.
Ive heard a lot of very expensive systems (and lots of cheaper ones too) and the expensively put together high-end system ALWAYS did things that the cheaper ones couldn't do. Scale, density of sound, staging, detail and impact. Many of them were not to my taste.
As an example, I recently bought my end-game speakers and after a couple of months bought the manufacturer recommend i/c's and speaker cables. The difference between them and my well-regarded existing cables was "not subtle".