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 hope all of you who took time to comment also took the survey. Results improve as sample size increases. 

No, this informal little survey is not perfect. It certainly has limitations. Ideally, this would be a "constant sum" question format where respondents had to allocate 100 "points" across the different options. This is much better for trade-off analysis. 

I did include a lot of choices. My objective here was to help discover how an experienced audiophile would rank the relative importance of something like Speaker Placement to something like Digital Bitrate. Yes, an inherently limited way to address this question, but it is appropriate in the real world where you have uninformed, but well-meaning music fans trying to improve sound quality in the wrong way. 

Spotify just announced they are introducing a HiRes plan. Amazon did the same last year. My view is that this is a marketing move to prey upon the ignorance of the average music listener. Many will pay more for a higher quality stream, only to stream this from their iPhone via bluetooth to a wireless speaker,...an absurd proposition. 

For every 1 of you audiophiles out there, there are 1,000 well-meaning music lovers who want better sound but have no clue about how to get it. Over the last 25 years, digital music has delivered wonderous gains in convenience and choice. But simultaneously, and quietly, hardware has regressed. The inherent portability of digital music fueled a wave of portable devices; players, speakers, wireless, etc. Great. But we all know SQ was lost in the process. 

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! The next "cohort" of misled music fans have accepted the above reality, but are focused on vibration reduction and cabling while their speakers are placed poorly in a room. 

I woke up to this reality several years ago and have been on a hifi journey since. It has brought me great joy and I think all of us who appreciate great sound should be doing everything we can to educate others. You do not need higher bit-rates (yet), you just need to get real speakers and a real amplifier, suited to the room and setup correctly. 

OK. There is some context. Don't take the survey design too seriously. It was a whim to take a quick pulse on the community.  

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.

I will not repeat one of my last post here....

Room acoustic controls is first and last critical component, nevermind the speakers type or the sources...Only acoutical law could give you the natural timbre experience....Not the branded patented name of your gear by itself alone... Not the price paid save for ignorant and rich people... Sorry....

Audio threads motivated by conditioning electronic desaign market hype are the worst place for understanding audio.... Acoustic book the best....

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)

The premise of ' step up ' is a good point of focus which implies a degree
of experience and personal value for a basis.

For me:
Speaker 
Media Preference Source - TT / Phono Pre / DAC / Streamer Transport (PC) / CD Player 
Pre Amp
Amp 
Cables
Starting Goal was a Full Component (Separate) System
The two big surprises for me are - 1) Passive System and 2) How much that came together and how well.
None of it would have come together without a my local retail shop.
Once I had a loudspeaker selection that I had confidence in the obstacles fell (only because I had a very good idea of what mattered to me).
After a brief dable with components an Integrated brought everything together.