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

Speakers only matter up to a certain price point if you understand room acoustics, setup and the art of integrating subs.

Thereafter, all the flagship nuance, high end magic, etc is created by the front end electronics.

+1 to thinking of Systems rather than individual components.

Some people need to think of speakers first. If filling a room with sound at high levels is important, perhaps speakers have to be the first consideration

On the other hand, speakers can’t reproduce what’s not there in the first place. Worse, high resolution speakers can reveal any sonic shortcomings in the source. People that prefer vocal and acoustic music for which tonal quality and being able to hear environment cues might be better suited to finding source components that can better convey these aspects of music that are difficult to reproduce well.

What @deep_333 said. +100

I go STRAIGHT from the recorded material I'm interested to listen to, then the rest of components.