Krycek, I have to disagree with your general premise. For many people, the hobby IS improving your system. It is often also about excess. MANY people here pay more for their speaker cables than most do for their main system and big-screen TV combined. I'm not saying it has to be that way or that it can not be enjoyable if it is not. However, if those cables make me enjoy my system more and I can afford them, then the expense is justified.
I respect how you feel about this hobby, but to tell someone else to just be happy with their current system may be poor advice. So what if it is "hard and time consuming"? So is running marathons, basketball, painting, gardening, woodworking, car racing, bull fighting, etc. This is a hobby. Should all of these hobbies be abandoned so we can sit and listen to mediocre sound reproduction?
Although extending this to high end audio may be a little grandiose, most of the improvements in society are made by euroe who obsess about what appear to others to be very small details.
I respect how you feel about this hobby, but to tell someone else to just be happy with their current system may be poor advice. So what if it is "hard and time consuming"? So is running marathons, basketball, painting, gardening, woodworking, car racing, bull fighting, etc. This is a hobby. Should all of these hobbies be abandoned so we can sit and listen to mediocre sound reproduction?
Although extending this to high end audio may be a little grandiose, most of the improvements in society are made by euroe who obsess about what appear to others to be very small details.