10 years spent seriously building a ‘budget’ system on mostly used equipment, I ended up with a 10% speaker (LS-50) that really isn’t worth upgrading, yet. Along the way I went through 5 amps, 4 pre-amps, three sets of speakers, three brands of cables, 4 DACs, tubes, transistors, old school, new school, you get the picture.
None of the equipment was cheap, or bad for that matter. But the one thing that was apparent was that speakers made the least difference. However, the best speakers had the greatest intolerance for poor quality. Components that sounded great on cheaper speakers sounded bad on really good, resolving speakers. Conversely, all the speakers sounded good on good equipment. And full range is never cheap, so I live with the sub for when it’s needed.
Most importantly, once a certain quality threshold is met, price and performance are not as coupled as one may think, which is why few end up on the same path when it comes to price for a particular component.