Survey: HiFi System Priorities

For your survey, I would suggest reducing the number of categories as someone who drafts surveys in my day job. There are too many categories to sort easily. I might suggest:

Source
Amplification
Speakers
Speaker cables
Interconnect cables
Acoustic room treatment

Those choices alone will generate a wide range of responses. And I agree with @millercarbon that a survey is probably not the right way to answer your friend's question. Your survey results will just likely show that there is a divide between the speaker-first people and the source-first people, while the "truth" probably lies somewhere in between the philosophies of the two groups. As I mentioned above, listening is the only way for your friend to figure out what is the "truth" for him in terms of what part of the system to emphasize.

I'd advise against overspending on speakers before getting the upstream sources to a reasonable level. As an extreme example, adding great speakers to a Sonos system would even more clearly reveal the shortcomings of the sound quality coming from the Sonos. I see the speakers as a window into the rest of a system.

+1 to the suggestion from @tablejockey to go listen before deciding priorities. A good shop will know how to put together a system that sounds good and your friend can hear the effect of spending more or less on "better" or "worse" components for different parts of the system.

No system is "perfect" right off the bat, but a good shop can provide a good starting point that your friend can modify over time to his preferences.

About your comment,

" My personal view, which I shouldn’t share while I’m posing a survey question but I will anyway, is that most of these folks chasing bitrates would do FAR better if they refocused their energy and money on quality speakers and amplification,...suited to the room and setup correctly. With wires!"

I would agree in terms of bit rate generally as Qobuz sounds best to me regardless of whether it is "Hi-Res" or CD quality and Spotify Premium sounds 2nd best (better than Tidal and Amazon "Hi-Fi") But my perspective on equipment is that you can’t hear what’s not there and you can’t unhear distortion/noise by adding better amps and speakers. I’ve found the improvement in sound quality along the dimensions of presence, detail, and coherence in music from moving from WiFi to Ethernet streaming (with WiFi turned off) to be much greater than that from switching between Spotify and Qobuz. Going from an AmazonBasics Cat 6 Ethernet cable to a Supra Cat 8 cable also made a significant difference as did moving to a dedicated streamer from an PC or iPhone output. You can’t reproduce what’s not already there in the signal & you can’t clean up a signal that’s polluted with jitter and analog noise.

I will say that local files (WAV files) sound best to me. Perhaps because they take a shorter signal path before going to the amplifier than streamed files.

I will acknowledge that this is a personal perspective, as I know other listeners care about different characteristics of music than I do. (e.g., ability to play deep bass, extended top end)