What improvement came first?


I was sitting here thinking, listening to David Gilmour. Be that as it may, What equipment improvements came ahead of others? For example, in order to hear the difference between amps, wouldn’t you need better speakers first to hear the difference? So in my thinking, speakers advanced ahead of amps.  It was only once speakers became good enough, that the more subtle differences could be heard. But is that correct? What improves came before other ones? Did tone arms need to improve ahead of more advanced cartridges? If so, then improvements of one part can totally depend on advancement of another part first. Improvements in equipment are not just incremental within a category but between categories. 
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Thanks for all your sensible and eye-opening contributions.
To say the truth i know only a few things about audio.... Others here know very much more than me, acoustician, engineers, very well experienced audiophiles etc...

But the few things i know of, are ALL learned by myself and by listening experiments and experience....It is so true that if you read my posts you will see that i only speak about the same few things.... But what i said is about what i called embeddings controls, and these facts are not so well known or publicized for the benefit of all... Then i speak about these little but important facts i played with and understand...

All i know can be resume in 6 words: dont upgrade before embedding it all...

I am creative tough, even if ignorant, and all my embedding devices are low costs, and homemade, they are the fruit of my experiment and of my desire to live an audiophile experience without much money...Anyway i succeeded.... Thats all....

Thanks then for your kind and generous appreciation.... Merry Christmas and stay healthy.....
At first there was no goal of highest fidelity and reproducing recognizable sound at all was fairly impressive. Then pretty much every improvement could be considered low hanging fruit. It would just be a matter of doing the best you can in your own area of expertise without much concern about who else is doing what. The real world isn’t like a video game where you have to level up in a certain order. If you recognize an area that has room for improvement and no one is doing it, that is an opportunity. Never forget that this is a business as well as a hobby. There is no master plan in the free market.
Never forget that this is a business as well as a hobby. There is no master plan in the free market.
i dare to object to you that the "free" market is a pure theoretical construct that never existed and cannot exist at all because non regulated markets are rigged very rapidly by concentrate invisible center of powers ....

The " apparently free and at the same time really not so free" market first conception is the fruit of a brain that lived in the first years of the 17 century.... Bernard Mandeville whom Hayek and Milton Friedman call "our master Brain".... Adam Smith steal from him not without ereasing the cynic and dreadful lucidity of Mandeville and veiling, with others after him, the not so "beautiful" idea of a so called market which seems free but which is not really free, with the more "noble" idea that it can be totally "free"...

There is no such thing as a "free" market , except in the head of Friedman and others...In the head of the genius Mandeville, the Market seems to be free but is not in reality, because there is 2 center of powers in any society that concentrate the power in the direction which is the best for them... Mandeville create centuries before Marx the idea of social competitive classes BUT not based on economical struggles at all but on socio- psychological power struggles between a psychotic elite and a psychopathic mafia, the nevrotic masses between these 2....He was less economically naive than even Marx or Smith...Mandeville even create psychoanalysis centuries before Freud, incredible but true....


Back to audio now...

In audio the interest of this non "free" and apparently free market is selling merchandise, not advising people that audiophile experience is possible at very low cost and with some simple means to controls the mechanical, the electrical and acoustical embeddings of the audio system...

It is the same thing in the pharma industry.... Is it some deep research about cheap generic medecine easily available ? No, there is no money there and no reason to invest in a low cost product with no more patent right attach to it and especially not if this cheap medecine work marvellously....  It is better for this non free and oriented market to create new products at higher cost for the consumers and to sell these to them, even if they dont work better and even if they work worst....

Economic science is way less scientific then astrology even for forecasting...Nobel economic prizes are mostly  second grade mathematical prize at best or in the worse case an ideological prize... 

1+1= 2

Merry Christmas and i apologize for my perhaps rude answer....

I wish you the best from my heart....
Get your mind back to 'Talkies'.

Sound on film was THE REVOLUTION. Amplification, and speakers to fill a theater with sound were the real deal. Home equipment got the low hanging fruit.