How to divide a budget between components

My percentage costs have shifted throughout the 5 years in this hobby, but as it stands now, 1/3 in cables and room treatments, 1/3 in electronics and 1/3 in speakers.

I personally believe more $ should be spent on room treatments than most people, myself included, spend. Speaker placement, room selection within your home and room treatments play a big role.

I think a person can only obtain a mid-fi sound without room treatments or so so electronics driving very nice speakers. I have found that high quality electronics and some room treatments can make most speakers sound pretty good.

It's interesting to think that many listeners have only heard 50% of what their speakers are capable of and I believe this is part of the reason why some of us suffer from upgradiatis.

Noromance, I can hear quite an audible difference with cables. I lose quite a bit of detail swapping between monster speaker cable and blue jeans rca's vs. my signal cable silver resolution speaker cables and rca's. Not sure if you consider them to be "silly priced cables" but they definitely make a difference.

I think its kind of silly to understand that the source is very important because you can't replace a signal down stream that was lost right of the gate on the source, but that you don't believe that the cables transferring the signal are of major importance... Preserve as much of the original recording by using a high quality source then throw it out the window because you have crappy interconnects?

Noromance, I see your point and it does make sense. I agree, I dont think people should buy $500 cables for $500 speakers. You'd probably be better off buying $950 speakers and $50 cables to start, then later on upgrade your cables.

By the way, great sound is what I'm after and thats not always related to cost. I wouldn't put $250 cables in my system if they didn't sound better than $50 cables. The cool thing about getting good cables is that you can hang onto them and they should make all of the speakers you cycle through on the upgrade path sound as good as possible.

I guess it comes down to spreading the $ money around somewhat evenly. Its not a great idea to have $3000 in your front end and $600 speakers, but then again I would rather have $3000 in front end and $1500 speakers than vice versa.

Maybe this thread and question should be paired with where diminshing returns come into play, or even better, at what price does gear actually start to take bigger steps forward in sound quality.