And the biggest influence on sound quality is...

My experience is the quality of the recording is at the top of the list. You can’t make bad engineered recordings sound good regardless of your room or system IMHO.

I generally agree with the OP .My mood is tied with the recording quality.

@mark200mph

“My ears. Have fun with it all and the experience”

I would agree most people would leave this out of the discussion. And yes if your hearing is deficient, you may not know it without a hearing test and you can do something about it by getting hearing aids. Also it was mentioned that the recording is something you don’t have control over. I would disagree since many individual albums have different pressings and some have been remastered. Therefore one may able to get a better recording. As far as CD or streaming, yes there are versions that are better recordings than others and many are better resolution as well.

It’s first the quality of the recording in my experience. Garbage in, garbage out. Then the speakers and then the source - streamer or CD into the DAC. Then preamp, amp and finally cables. The room is a wild card. I have a system that travels between 2 places which are very different. One is a listening room that’s been treated and the other is an open room with no treatment. My best system sounds better in both rooms than the old system I had.

Two separate issues are being conflated here. The recording is not a part of the system, but an input to the system, and its quality is a fixed condition beyond the listener's control. The relevant question is what's the strongest determinant WITHIN the playback system/environment.

This is a fun thought experiment.

If your source is LP, then I would argue that your playback system (turntable, arm, cartridge, setup) is most important.  Imagine you had near mint pressing of Kind of Blue or Aja, and you played it on a $35 Crossley.  It would sound like sh*t.  However, given a decent playback system, the recording is next.

Digital is very different as you can get acceptable sound from a modest or inexpensive source.  Here I would put the recording quality first.

Then it gets difficult.  Speakers are very important but require a suitable amplifier and proper setup in a room that they work well in.  Too many dependencies, but if I had to rank: Speakers > Set-Up > Room > Amplification.  Then comes the fun of cables, power, and tweaks.

The room and the system are what they are, recording quality easily the greatest variable. Now, one  can manipulate and change audio components and room treatments, same doesn't hold true for any particular recording.

My ears. Have fun with it all and the experience.

Ultimately, recording quality and room will define the limits, but I am talking about top level equipment. In your average $50k system I am not sure which component contributes most. But I belong more to source first school, so, I guess, it's either the recording or "transport", be it turntable itself, cd transport or tape deck transport. Poor recording will sound like junk anywhere but with average recording the better your set up is the better it will sound. It's a continuum from very poor to great recordings, and I think the answer to the question is more complicated than this or that.

Room 1st which includes dimensions and treatments.

system synergy 2nd - from cables to matching amp to speakers.

3rd is speakers sized for the room. You don’t want small monitors in a 30’ room and you don’t want large Wilson’s in a 10x10’ room. I had large speakers in a dedicated room within a room 27’ long with 15’ ceilings. I moved to a smaller house and tried the same speakers in a 16’’ long room with 8’ ceilings, great speakers in a large room to terrible sounding in a much smaller room. 
 

Right behind the speakers are the amps/dac/preamp all spec’d according to the value of the speakers. Your not going to spend $2000 on an amp if you have $100,000 speakers and you wouldn’t be spending $100,000 on an amp and dac if your speakers cost $3500.

These days, I find myself focusing on well recorded music. With access to so much content, why waste time trying to make a turd sound good.

It is the whole system which, of course, begins with the input and ends with the room. But like any chain every link matters. If any link fails the system fails. But in some ways the input could be thought of first. The rest of the system is basically set. Changing any part involves time, effort and money. A lousy source is easily replaced.

But let me throw out another thought. After over six decades of audiophilia I have come to believe the one characteristic of sound most important to sounding real is a system is dynamic linearity. And I don't mean the first thought of what usually comes to mind which is the ability to play loud cleanly. This is part of dynamic linearity. Dynamic linearity is the ability of the system to accurately, linearly, follow the source(which hopefully albeit too often isn't dynamically linear). It's the ability to make linear level changes whether the change is micro or mini or midi or macro. Think of a live, unamplified orchestra. Change your seat and the frequency response changes and yet it still is live. Or think about listening to acoustic music at the door outside the room. The sound is significantly affected and yet you know it's live sound. It's dynamic linearity.

1. The room. A modest system in a great room can sound great whereas a great system in a bad room will sound worse - the wider you open the window, the more much flies in, as the saying goes.

2. The system - at the risk of repeating myself across various threads, systems are called systems for reason - it is the quality of the individual components but also how they do or don't work together as a system.

Recordings are what they are. A great system in a great room will make a bad recording listenable. A great recording on that system in that room will sound wonderful.

A great recording on a bad system in a bad room will sound "meh" at best.

Quality of the recording because it sets the ceiling. You can reach it or you might fall short of it, but you can’t exceed it

...a glass of great wine.

1. The room. A modest system in a great room can sound great whereas a great system in a bad room will sound worse - the wider you open the window, the more much flies in, as the saying goes.

2. The system - at the risk of repeating myself across various threads, systems are called systems for reason - it is the quality of the individual components but also how they do or don't work together as a system.

Recordings are what they are. A great system in a great room will make a bad recording listenable. A great recording on that system in that room will sound wonderful.

A great recording on a bad system in a bad room will sound "meh" at best.

If you're just getting started, the speakers and room are the places to spend your resources, but at some point it all matters.  Once the system reaches a higher level, you need to more careful to match anything new that gets added to the system level or it'll become the weak link....and the weak link is usually matters most.  

Back in the early 80s I sold, delivered and set up a system for a customer who was an opera nut, was well off financially, and was beginning to realize his mortality…he had an illness soon to be known as AIDS.  He lived in a brownstone on Commonwealth Ave. in Boston’s Back Bay…a very exclusive location.  I sold him a pair of KEF 104/2s, a NAD 7155 receiver, and matching CD player…good gear, but not what we call High End today, or then.  The room was amazing…high coffered ceilings, oriental rugs, dark wood library shelving, a baby grand Steinway.  I wired it up with 16 ga. zip cord off a spool, as we had no advance notice what lengths would be needed.  The sound I heard from that system was better than anything I had imagined possible.  It was the room.

What about the listener? Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, isn’t it?

The room before the quality of the recording as there is nothing anyone of us can do about that. After the room, everything matters equally if you are really wanting to get a real hifi rig.

That is what I was thought you meant. Thanks for clarifying.

@audiorusty Hello. By setup I meant the position of the speakers and the listening seat.

I would put the room first, quality of the recording and then speakers third, though I am not 100% sure what you mean by the set-up.

I would think speakers would be before the room.  

tomcarr

Funny that you post this. It has been my experience over many years that matches yours. The quality of the recording and engineering/production makes ALL the difference in the world. Garbage in, garbage out. It does not matter how resolving the audio setup can be, a bad recording will sound bad. Conversely, a very high quality recording that has been produced and engineered well... will make a good system sound sublime. I don't doubt that the quality of the component will make a difference. But in my experience the recording itself makes a bigger difference. My two cents...

I've got recordings that make my system sound horrible, and I've got recordings that make my system sound absolutely wonderful.

I'm thinking that you have it backwards.  You have records that sound horrible or wonderful and your system sounds the same with either.