Do you belong more to souce first or to speakers first school of thought ?

we are talking about excellent or better source and similar level speakers.

what's excellent/better? How do you define it? By a threshold of what?

speakers add the most distortion and coloration so you have to start with speakers you like the sound of that fit your room. All this crap about the guy from Naim declaring source first is just that,,,, crap from a guy who sold sources...

Put a $1000 all in one streamer/integrated amp with $100,000 speakers.

Then put a $100,000 front end with some $1000 speakers.

I can guarantee you which one will sound better.

Neither will sound good. Spend $30000 on speakers and $70000 on the rest.  Front end is more important. 

I think, if the prices are adequate, $30k speakers/$70k the rest is an excellent balance. Just match it all well.

I’ve done the totals on the MSRPs of what I am actually listening to and I am still under 30k. I’d love to go either way with 30k and 70k. Either way. (I don’t know what it would come to if I added up the stuff that is in a dormant state. There is actually enough dormant to create an extra system with stuff left over.) My electronics up front : speakers ratio is way heavy on the electronics end. At one time I was in the camp that felt good electronics could make average speakers shine and that poor electronics would bring good speakers down. Now I am not so sure about that. (And I realize that good, average and poor are all relative terms.)