First, there seems to be a bit of confusion as to what source means here. Some are thinking source is referring to the original recording, and others are referring to the device that is playing the music file. For my purposes source is defined as the latter.

I would say source > equipment > bitrate. There is a small caveat to this though, I think you will see diminishing returns much sooner with your source device/s than you will with the gear you listen to your source device with.

The quality of your recording goes first and then everything else.

I consider bitrate to be fundamental, otherwise files would suck more and more using better equipment. Personally I use V0 or 320 mp3 when going lossy, or just FLAC.
Source: DAC are extremely important and more so than amps. I consider DAC and headphones to be of equal importance. If the DAC provides a wrongly coloured signal (colour is not necessarily wrong per se) you'll hear it through the other components. If the headphone has flaws, you won't be set either. Among the most common headphone flaws, midrange might be too recessed, there could be treble peaks, or certain areas of bass (mid/upper bass region) could be so uncontrolled to be nausea-inducing or just plain muddy.

Staying with sources, digital cables often have importance because they can impose part of their signature onto DACs. I don't know the technicals but it's very apparent when swapping different digital and different dac's. The weirdest thing that occurred to me was seeing certain digital cables that colour completely different dac's in similar ways.

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source, source, souce, >equipment>bitrate

but i'm talking a wider view of source and that actually includes bitrate and jitter reduction. you tell me where else in this chain jitter reduction happens and i'll change my stance. jitter is a digital artifact/effect and in this chain digital ends at the source. I dont consider the original recording to be part of source, but since bitrate is aplied after that (usually in the source/transport; I will include it there)

but recording quality isnt in your list and of great importance IMO
I will include transport as part of the source here for ease

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X2 and for some reason those people that havent actually heard a quality modern source seem to think it doesnt matter anymore with modern equipment. funny that when a zune and ipod that use the same family dac sound similar



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see my first statement. for sure its important; although i'm not sure its as important as the people selling massively expensive low jitter solutions would have us believe or as complicated. its distortion; only digital and therefor nonlinear, though still causal