You start with the room 1st. I built a room within a room in a custom house and the room plus treatments were $60,000, before spending 1 dime on electronics. When you are designing a custom home with a custom audio room, it’s cheaper to do things in the beginning than to retrofit it. I have friends that spent more than that on their rooms.
As for equipment, money spent does matter. Everything in the audio stream matters: the microphones, the cables for the mics, the artists amps/guitars/piano, mixers, the recorders, just before it gets recorded on the medium. Engineers do not use $200 pioneer reel to reels to record a song.
I don’t think it matters if you like music or you like the equipment, if you just like the music, get you a pair of beats headphones and call it a day. If you want the best sound quality possible, then it’s going to cost you. $500 speakers modified to the hilt will still sound like $500 speakers, same goes for amps/dacs/etc