In article , Glenn Richards
writes
Chris Morriss wrote:

Do you really mean that? A £300 amp is pretty good, whereas a pair of
£200 speakers are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Have asked a number of people, the opinion seems to be split roughly 3 ways:

1. Keep the amp and upgrade the speakers

2. Upgrade the speakers now and the amp later

3. Upgrade both amp and speakers

I'm inclined to lean towards number 2 at present. Had a chat with a few
people (including Arcam) at the show yesterday, and the general opinion
seemed to be that the amp has the least effect on the sound, and
speakers have the most.

Arcam were a bit non-committal, but suggested Monitor Audio was a good
place to start. So I had a chat with the MA guys who mentioned that
their £599 speaker was having a revision, and the older version should
be available at a discount fairly soon. I have quite a liking for MA
speakers, so I shall definitely give that one a try.

I am of the old-fashioned view that spending money to buy decent
speakers is never wasted.

Agreed. What did surprise me... Chord Company have just released the
Cobra 3 interconnect, so they were selling off the Cobra 2s at under
half price (£25 instead of £55). So I treated myself...

The difference is quite dramatic. I've linked the BB50 directly into the
"Power Amp Direct" input on my amp (basically bypasses all the input
selector, buffering etc and goes straight into the volume control) and
it sounds fairly amazing.

Quite honestly for the price of them (£200 about 5 years ago - yup,
Richer Sounds special during my student days!) the Symphony 6s are
amazing, lovely deep bass and lots of mid/treble detail. Obviously they
won't be a patch on a set of Monitor Audio speakers, but even so they do
sound good.


Course for an amp upgrade you should be able to pick up a decent
Audiolab integrated on ebay for a couple of hundred squids, and its
still an excellent unit even by today's standards)
--
Tony Sayer