What was your biggest priority?

For me, it was a tie, all at around $1500 apiece:

Speakers (Klipsch La Scala professionals)
Front Amps (KT88 monoblocks - Rogue M120)
Power Conditioner (Tice 3C-HP)

I focused on the power plant... I'm mainly into hard
rock, heavy metal, space rock (Hawkwind et al) and dub.
It's a sweet sounding, high-power tube/horn rig with
tons of headroom and dynamic slam.

records and cd's absorb about 3/4ths of the money i spend in this hobby. speakers & amps, preamp, cd player, turntable/arm/cartridge, in that order consume the rest. cost of components were about the same for each. very very little spent on tweaks, other than speaker cable and interconnect.

For me, the biggest expenditure was for the speakers. The power amps are next at about 70-80% of the speaker costs. Following that is the speaker wire at about 50% of the power amps. Following that are the DAC set-up and the pre-amp at about the same cost and at about 65% of the speaker cable. Note that I really "needed" that speaker cable for a previous set-up and I kept it in the one I have now. My analog system is used and nice but not fantastic. My power regenerator is pretty good. My cables overall are OK but not fantastic. My CD player is good but not fantastic. My next steps are to look at cables and pre-amp. My lowest priority, but something I will get to, are power cables -- right now, I've got good but not great pc's. Good question -- I look forward to seeing other responses.

P.S. Someday, I also hope to really dig into analog, but that's pretty pricey to do right and I would also have to invest heavily in records.