Interesting situation! Do we need this....

High end gear is not required to get great sound that is truly a pleasure to listen to. At least for most of us. I’m finding now that I didn’t need to buy a 75" 4k HDR TV either. It’s nice and I’m not complaining, but when I didn’t have access to it while moving and had to use an older 55" LCD with some noticeable color issues I was still having a great time. You don’t need a high end road bike to enjoy bicycling either. When we got jobs in bike shops after high school me and my friends upgraded to top of the line bikes of the time. After a few months of riding my friend asked me, "Are we really having any more fun than we were on our cheap bikes?" The answer was clearly no. You couldn’t possibly have any more fun than we had in terms of riding. But the new bikes were fun to put together, and there was some pride of ownership, and the new bikes required less maintenance, so we were inclined to keep them. Since then I’ve limited my expenses on bikes even though I’m still super enthusiastic. I’ve done the same with audio equipment, and video equipment. If I could easily afford the very best then sure, maybe, why not? But I’ve got no fear of missing out on what I’m really after. Epicurus said something along the lines of "that which we really need to be happy is free or at least easy to attain."

@thespeakerdude

Totally agree about what’s important for a great bicycling experience. And I’m sold on the tubeless concept but haven’t implemented it yet. Next set of tires I’m going tubeless. My rims are tubeless ready.

You have a good point about the big TV. I use it for computing and it is very nice to see everything big and clear while I relax in the recliner.

@thespeakerdude

Indeed, that 15lbs of fat off your ass is much more important than 15lbs off the bike. That’s been my experience. I used to go on a fast training ride every Thursday here in town. I had a 27lb Raleigh Technium and I’d get dropped on one of the hills every time. One day I came out with my new weapon - a 17 lb Bianchi with all Dura-Ace. I was eager to hit that hill and when we got there I got dropped. It was as if nothing had changed. Skip ahead 8 weeks of fairly serious training and that hill was no longer a problem - even on the Technium. I think gaining power is even more important than getting fat off your ass. But if you do it right you'll both lose weight and gain power. I've tried dieting by counting calories and witnessed myself get lighter and slower. The trick for me is to ride often and pretty hard and watch what I kinds of things I eat, not how much. I gotta eat as many calories as my body asks me for or I get weak. For me the right foods seems to be very low fat, high carb, but not refined sugars or wheat. The refined sugars and wheat may not make me fat but they make my old teeth hurt, as does diet soda for some reason. 

I did low carb for about 4 years. I was serious about it - extremely low carb. And it worked in certain ways. I had a very good ability to go for long periods without eating anything while doing moderately vigorous work.  I was great at dealing with cold weather, but struggled with heat stress in the summer. That kind of diet automatically means high fat, and any success for me on that diet meant being extremely picky about what kinds of fats I ate. When I started to get cheap on that diet, going for chicken and pork and other sources of fat high in polyunsaturates it became a problem. I'm thinking now the key is not total carbs or fat,  but total polyunsaturated intake. I experimented with an ultra low fat diet partly because I realized that even the best sources of fat are considerably higher in polys than something like a banana or a boiled potato. So I cut the fats to see what would happen, and so far it's been great. I'm coming up on 2 years now. No cravings for anything with higher amounts of fat have materialized at all. They say the polys are essential fats, suggesting that if you don't eat them you'll die or get gravely ill. The evidence is uncertain that they're needed at all. They seem to be fattening and accumulate in our bodies with age. As body fat levels go up, the percentage of polyunsaturates in the adipose tissue also goes up. The only way that can happen is if you are eating them. Our bodies don't make them. If we do need them, I see zero evidence that they are needed beyond about 0.5% of calories, and pretty much anything natural that you can eat has at least that much.

I think what is interesting about the situation is that the op inadvertently listened blind, and was surprised by the enjoyment. I’ve been through this myself many times, discovering that my ability to discern sound quality is much higher than my need for it for optimal musical enjoyment. At a certain point it’s just a curiosity, a freakish thing that a sound system can be so accurate and capable down to the finest minutia, but I get bored with that aspect of it. In building my own speakers, attempting to get to a higher level of performance is a lot of fun. It’s an attempt to pull of a stunt and I’m happy when I do it, but then I need to find something new to do, so I try something new and then people say "Won’t you ever find the system you’re truly happy to listen to and enjoy music with?" My answer is that’s way too easy. I’ve had dozens of those systems.

Another thing I will say about this is that the pursuit of ultra high end sound quality for the sake of musical enjoyment has a certain self defeating quality to it for me. It never sounds quite like live musicians. There are too many complications for that to happen. So no matter what it’s a compromised presentation. But that’s ok because it doesn’t have to be perfect. So if it’s not going to be perfect because it can’t be, it’ fine if it’s imperfect in a number of different ways about equally. If it’s got certain things uncannily accurate while it still suffers from built in issues with the way recordings are made and the limited number of speakers, inter aural crosstalk, all that, then it actually can become distracting. To my ear the electronics and speaker quality pretty quickly can get way out ahead of the quality limitations inherent in a 2 channel recording played into both ears at the same time in a room that is invariably coloring the sound. If I’m going to work on something I’m going to be looking for new and novel ways to present the sound differently - a more holistic approach rather than squinting at minutia like the sound differences of dacs or speaker cables. To me it’s case of straining at gnats while swallowing camels. But to each his own! One person’s camel may be another’s gnat.

I’ll bring up another point that’s similar to me - perfect blacks on OLED TVs. I went with a mini LED even though I can see the blooming. It’s no big deal to me because I don’t typically watch in a perfectly dark room, and a lot of the content that I enjoy has a lot of brightness all over the screen. So the overall persistent brightness limit is more of a big deal to me than the perfect blacks, which I have trouble seeing most of the time because of the lighting in the room and my own eyes and glasses causing glare. The biggest thing I notice, especially in outdoor daylight scenes, is that clouds and glare on water and stuff like that are much, much brighter than TVs can currently produce. I don’t see a lot of perfect blacks anywhere in my world.