Single most important factor is your room. It's not just speaker placement or room treatments, some speakers will never work well in your room no matter where you put them or how many magic panels you put up. You have to find a speaker that works in your room, then find an amp that drives the speaker well, and then use the rest of your cash for the best preamp and source components you can afford. The last components to consider are cables and power conditioners and room treatments, because while everything makes a difference, you can find reasonable alternatives to the pricey doodads (e.g., having an electrician wire you a dedicated outlet may be cheaper than a $5K conditioner, or look into those cheap Belden speaker wires which sound damned good in some systems and will serve you well until you can afford the fancy stuff). But if your speakers don't play your room, your megabuck DAC will sound like crap.
A stupid question for which there's no sensible answer.
I know, I know. At least I've labeled it properly.
Here goes: of the following elements of a system, how would you rank their influence on the sound? In other words, generally, which would someone want to upgrade or prioritize, and in what order, if all of the following pieces were inferior to an amp/preamp and speakers they were happy with? Power cables, connector cables. speaker cables. streaming source, music source, dac (I vote for this one as #1), room treatment, speaker placement, type of chair, earwax quotient, what you ate for lunch, etc.
I hereby give my permission for everyone to tell me this is an idiotic question since the real answer is: it depends. (But I did put a "generally" in there somewhere). Anyway, I prefer that we debate this based on what we've experienced when we've tinkered. So I guess I'm really interested in anecdotes.
Here goes: of the following elements of a system, how would you rank their influence on the sound? In other words, generally, which would someone want to upgrade or prioritize, and in what order, if all of the following pieces were inferior to an amp/preamp and speakers they were happy with? Power cables, connector cables. speaker cables. streaming source, music source, dac (I vote for this one as #1), room treatment, speaker placement, type of chair, earwax quotient, what you ate for lunch, etc.
I hereby give my permission for everyone to tell me this is an idiotic question since the real answer is: it depends. (But I did put a "generally" in there somewhere). Anyway, I prefer that we debate this based on what we've experienced when we've tinkered. So I guess I'm really interested in anecdotes.