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

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.

Also it doesn’t matter if your source ends up being multiples in price of your speakers. You don’t have to buy a top line speaker to match, as often the top speaker model has a half dozen drivers and is designed for a cavernous listening space and requires very high wattage amps, which if not setup carefully can reduce it's performance to below that of the middle tier models (which are much cheaper).

@agisthos +1 both posts.  I would add room design/treatments to your list as well, maybe first on the list.

Speakers only matter up to a certain price point if you understand room acoustics, setup and the art of integrating subs.

Thereafter, all the flagship nuance, high end magic, etc is created by the front end electronics.

+1 to thinking of Systems rather than individual components.

Some people need to think of speakers first. If filling a room with sound at high levels is important, perhaps speakers have to be the first consideration

On the other hand, speakers can’t reproduce what’s not there in the first place. Worse, high resolution speakers can reveal any sonic shortcomings in the source. People that prefer vocal and acoustic music for which tonal quality and being able to hear environment cues might be better suited to finding source components that can better convey these aspects of music that are difficult to reproduce well.