Some of Steve's comments made me think of a sort of grouping of important synergistic areas...
As in, these are combinations of gear (or groups) that folks try to find synergistic matches within:
General:
1 Amp/Speaker Cable/Speaker/Room size and type
2 Preamp/Amp/Interconnect/Tubes, etc.
Source/Cabling:
3 Transport type/DAC/Digital Cable/Interconnect, tubes, etc.
4 Turntable/Cartridge/Arm/Interconnect/transformers/preamp, etc.
So, those are 4 big areas where I see folks working generally. There are numerous ways to get it wrong but there aren't a lot of unbreakable 'rules' either. You can get good reproduction in a number of ways. And while we work on these things independently, each area is dependent on the other. So, a blanket statement that any one area is the most important can't be made of a system with several components. You'd have to define a 'source' anyway... is it a system of synergistic parts itself? If so, which part of the source group is the most important?
The only thing defining what is most important to us is what peaked our interest the most... And that's the most important part of the system... The one that makes you smile.
-C
