Do you belong more to souce first or to speakers first school of thought ?

Personally I really don’t belong to either / any, because it all matters. The generality of the speakers matter most is a good rule of thumb for the folks fairly new to pursuit of the high end… but it holds best when one has appropriate portioned investments in system components with traditional speaker technology. But can be wrong with specialty speaker technology (ie, planar) unique individual components of systems.

For many years I believed in first getting the source right\.  In the course of that, I think my source/speakers ratio became way source heavy.

the hierarchy of priorities is not the same at all levels of overall system performance.

for low and medium level system performance (1) speakers dominate the performance equation, followed closely by (2) the speaker/room/acoustics relationship, then (3) the speaker/amp relationship.

use to be that sources really varied in performance. these days finding a decent/cheap quality digital source is simple. and with streaming even media is a non issue. and decent analog is also easy to find.

so the days of the source limiting most system’s performance are in the past.

towards the top end of system performance it’s the room and sources + media that are more dominant than speakers. lots of good speakers. but great rooms and top level sources are still significant past a certain level of speaker performance.

the tip top digital or best tapes and original pressings + a really super sounding room takes the prize.

Amp first approach is less common but I can understand that. To a degree I would follow it too because I want to use tube amplification, though not necessarily SET, and some speakers just won't sing with tubes.

I think, I almost fully agree with what Mike said, generally speaking.