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

Well, sounds like they both matter.

Actually, there are people advocating amp or preamp/amp first approach. I understand them, especially if they talk tube equipment.

I look at speakers as the macro part of my system while the source/front end I consider to be micro. I found it much harder to find speakers that worked for me sonically, plus large heavy speakers are much harder to move around than front end equipment, when using the buy and try approach .

Once I found speakers that ticked my boxes sonically, and partnered appropriate amplifiers to drive them, the (heaviest to lift) macro portion of my sound was complete. Most here have at least adequate source components so it is not a matter of having great speakers and sucky source components. Once the source is mostly ok, upgrades to the source IME tend to be micro, or smaller incremental gains. In addition, digital source gear has experienced noticeable improvements almost annually over the past 5-10 years so my source has been the least stable part of my system, as I have upgraded DACs, servers, added a DDC, etc., and the more stable part of my system (amplifiers/speakers) seems to have kept up.

@mitch2 this is a reasonable way to look at the source versus speakers question.  In my main system, I shopped very carefully for the amp and speakers that met specific criteria I had for my room for both two and multiple channel uses (macro).  I have not felt a strong desire to replace those and have focused instead on improving sources and tweaking cables (micro).  Improving sources in this system have allowed me to get the most enjoyment out of my “macro” gear, and finally cure the upgrade bug.   

In my office system I have more modest amplification and speakers, but did not get the full benefits of what they had to offer until I placed a proper DAC in the chain.  In both cases, my systems were source limited, crap in, crap out.

One last comment, the performance envelope of budget speakers and DACs have improved significantly over the last decade.  If you can live with more pedestrian looks, you can get pretty high audio enjoyment for modest outlays of cash these days.  Achieving the last 10-20% of performance requires significantly greater investment, and probably should start with the listening room and power supply.

kn

Speakers and amps start to get very competent around 7-10k. You can triple that price and only get a different flavor of sound.

My advice is now find a speaker with a sound you like, then go to the moon on the source. Not just the DAC, but grounding, power distribution, streamer, equipment isolation, cables, e.t.c, can reveal a sound that you never thought possible from your speakers.

If you just had a normal equipment chain, good speakers can be ALMOST there, but there is always something unsatisfying. So you end up on the speaker merry go round (and amplifier merry go round). When you ignore the dac/grounding/power/cables chain, you never really heard what those speakers (or amp) were capable of.

I can now see this is the situation most audiophiles are in, including myself until about 10 years ago.