As a fun exercise and assuming you had a $20k budget how would you break that up in building your system? Goal would be to optimize realism and expanded sound stage.
If that really is the goal then why did you put the irrelevant pre-amp/amp, DAC and streamer restrictions on there? That's not a system you're building then, its a component shopping list.
If you really do want "to optimize realism and expanded soundstage" then here's how you do it. Nothing is any more important than anything else. So you allocate equal amounts to everything. Only you have to do it right, by general function not a shopping list. The whole point of the budget is to help you come up with the shopping list. Don't put the cart before the horse.
So what do you need?
Source, amp, speakers, wire. Four things. 25% or $5k each.
Now if you want a preamp and amp go for it. If you want a DAC and streamer go for it. Just know you have $5k total - and that the extra interconnect and power cord have to either come out of that budget or reduce the amount you have to spend on the others. Because your entire wire budget is the same $5k and that has to cover speaker cables, interconnects, and power cords for the whole system. Conditioner too, if you decide one makes sense.
Oh and by the way, if you wise up and realize you want a turntable that's a source. Arm and cartridge, source. The phono stage is an amp. The power cord(s) and interconnect(s) are wire. Keep your budget straight.
One more thing. This is just the simplest most dumbed down version of how to do it. The more sophisticated approach is to realize there's a whole lot more contributing to "realism and expanded sound stage" than those major components. There's also room treatments and tweaks. $20k is well into the range you could easily throw all those in there. This would shift the budget around to five categories, Source, Speakers, Amps, Wire, Tweaks. $4k each.
While staying within budget, I mean. Which was the whole idea. "How to divide up" thats a budget. Right?
