I don’t believe in the deification of studio engineers, producers, or mastering technicians. Many are very good but plenty of recordings for whatever reason aren’t. Also, often live music is mixed badly so there’s that issue for your reference needs (sat through a disturbingly bad sounding otherwise major players jazz show a couple of years ago, and thought..."Did the live sound tech pass out?"). I recently bought a Schiit Loki Max for this exact reason (recordings of course, although years as a pro live sound mixer has been a guilty pleasure), and although it’s usually out of the mix, I can put the Max in the mix if I think I need to. Also, most here likely don’t have any pro studio mixing or live mixing experience, and to say you need to listen to playback on what the studio used is silly...you going to buy a huge mixing board and hook it up to dozens of effects boxes and run it through a shipping container for reverb with Pro Tools on board and then send the mix to a mastering lab? Nope, you’re not gonna do any of that. I just read the previous post so consider this one el redundo...maybe roxy54 and I are the same person...
If you were serious about sound you would...
If your audiophile quest is to get the best sound then buy the best equipment used to make the recordings originally. One of the few things nearly every audiophile agrees about is that you can't make the signal better than the original. So:
Solid State Logic 2 channels preamp 5k$
Meyer Sound Bluehorn powered speakers 2x 140K$
Pro Tools MTRX system 10k$
Mac Studio Computer 8k$
Total about 170k$
How is it possible to get better sound than the best recording studio gear?