How competitive are you with your system?

Mine is not competitive at all.  It just sits there unmotivated until I turn it on.  I suspect that it is putting in minimum effort to please me.  it is like owning a cat.  Still, I do like it a lot.

What would my system be competing for anyway, even if it were motivated.  Is there a goal, a standard of excellence, a competitive mark to hit?  Given that there is no consensus standard by which a system can be compared to, I think it is sensible that my system has chosen to just sit there and do its least.

In those sort of crazy car stereo competitions, there was a criteria and a fixed goal--how loud can you get your system to play.  But, unless you have that same criteria for your home audio, I don't see it as a competition is there is no way to establish a "winner."  The only bragging rights would be for "how much was spent" which is at least objective, but does not say much else about the sound.  I am definitely NOT into even that sort of competition--few people have seen my system and I certainly DON'T want anyone to know how much it costs; most people would think it mad.  

I don't see how any reasonable evaluation via youtube is possible.  First, it takes a master recording engineer to do a recording properly and good microphones cost many thousands of dollars each, and many are needed so that the right microphone for the job can be selected.  Even with all of that, how will one know that the recording is faithful to the original without playing it back on a system which has its own sound; the only way to sort of close the loop is to hear the system in its original venue and hear the recorded playback immediately on multiple systems to confirm that the recording is reasonably faithful.  And even if you have that, the youtube watcher has a completely different system coloring the results such that any comparison is hopelessly flawed.  The only way to compare systems is to hear them in person, and the result is a purely individual, subjective assessment, not all that useful unless there was a big panel of judges that makes it sort of like a baking contest--the "winner" is a rough consensus choice.

Any "contest" comparing systems is NOT about the sound because there is never a valid sonic comparison.  It is about something else--how nice something looks, how much was spent or how little was spent, or how may pieces made the Stereophile category A list, etc.