I find this thread interesting, and I think it has become a bit confused due to not being able to agree on what the word “source” means in context of describing expenditures for an audio system. However, not being able to agree on something as simple as the definition of source shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone on this forum as we seldom seem to agree on anything.
I feel strongly that when Robert Harley was talking about how much money to allocate to the “source,” he was referring to whatever device you are primarily using to decode music. Of course, all music formats are sources, but your investment in them should not be confused with how much of your budget was allocated to the source that plays back your music investment. And having said that, I totally agree with everyone who commented that if your music format source is of low quality, it really doesn’t matter how much you spent anywhere else in your playback chain. As Myles said, “crap in, crap out.”
I think some other valid points were made here too regarding price points where the ratio should change for where you allocate your money. I agree that if you have a very modest budget, the majority of your money should be spent on the speakers as they will have the greatest impact on the sound quality. MikeL also made a very good point that as the amount of money you have poured into your system increases, the notion of having a great pair of speakers fed by inferior source components will drag down the whole system.
I do feel strongly that if you lose information at the source, it can’t be recovered downstream regardless of how great your components are. The better your source is, the more information you recover from your recording and it will sound more realistic. Can you really affix a ratio to this that makes sense in all budgets? I don’t know and I really don’t care about ratios. All I know is that I want the best source components that I can afford at a given point in time. Honestly, I have never really thought about the ratios that exist in my own system.
Another point I want to make that someone did touch on is the listening room. Ratios for allocating your budget to buy a stereo system do not take into account money that needs to be spent on the room that the stereo will be used in. It just seems to be assumed that the room is already up to snuff. I think we can all agree (and I emphasize think) that an incredibly expensive system set up in a bad sounding room will never sound good. Lucky are those among us that have dedicated stereo rooms whose room treatments are unfettered by their wives (and I count myself among the lucky ones).
In summary, I wouldn’t get hung up about ratios. There are two obvious things you need before you assemble any stereo system; a good sounding room and source material to play back. Once you have those two things, I would want to buy source components that can maximize the amount of information retrieval for the money you have available to spend.
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