First of all, I want to let you know that I've only been involved in this hobby for a few years. But, I agree with you that the recording is the most important thing. A top notch bluray on a Vizio will still look better than a bad DVD on a top of the line Panasonic.
IMHO, it's not really worth spending extra money unless one listens to a lot of classical music. Ok, outside of SACD listeners, or HT type speakers, whatever.
I even have around a hundred jazz recordings, and TBH, a lot of them, in fact by far most of them, don't have very good SQ. Good recording quality with classical is the
norm.
When I put on some rock bluray concert on my HT, people just LOVE the audio. The mains are about $500ish for the pair. They do sound great with rock. It's pretty difficult to hear the bit of midbass muddiness, or other smaller compromises, with anything less than 100% acoustic music, and for me personally, specifically classical. With rock, it sounds perfect I might say to most people.
Now, my stereo speakers cost many times over those HT mains. It's a completely different experience. Sure, most people prefer the dedicated HT, but I have several friends who just love and prefer the stereo (crazy imaging, very deep soundstage), and they're not even classical buffs, even though that's pretty much the only thing I feed them.
TBH, if I could only have one of the two, I'd take the HT. The stereo encumbers on my living room, and the HT simply gets more use it seems to me. I can also share it with more people at the same time, whereas with the stereo, the sweet spot is pretty small. Funny thing is that I got into this hobby from an audio first perspective, but have come out of it so far just as excited about video. I don't know, pretty even there perhaps.
Many of my friends simply play back pop/rock via MP3, using tiny cell phone speakers or tiny laptop speakers.
The difficulty with reproducing classical music has often been said to lie in the spatial information. The preference in obtaining music by physical media such as CD, rather than online, by audiophiles is again for the spatial information, so far as I have read.
I personally think that room acoustics and setup are more important than the speakers chosen, given that the speaker choice is not bose vs b&w. (This has been discussed before here, as you might imagine). I have heard 802Ds in the worst room evah! I even asked the dealer if the tweeters were blown! Just making a point. Or how about pulling a speaker out just an extra foot, reducing midbass muddiness to make it sound better than a speaker costing twice as much sitting at the original position. Endless possibilities. Or how about just having the listener get off the back wall!
So with that said, in order, in my opinion:
1. Source material
2. Room Acoustics/Setup
3. Speakers
4. Adequate amplification
5. Source players/prepros etc
