While I do think that there is a "gear head" - "music lover" continuum I think that a lot of it comes down to economics for the music lover. If you are clever and live in the right city you can hear a lot of decent to superb live music on the cheap. A basic system that can bring a music lover a reproduction of the music to convey some of the live experience isn't very costly. BUT trying to build a system that approaches the live experience is very expensive even before you have media costs (I'm up to 10,000 plus recording after 30 years). My wife and I are nuts about music live and recorded. Since we both work in very remunerative fields and have no kids we can now afford to indulge ourselves. We have "starving musician" friends who come over frequently for serious listening sessions with us and bring along a lot of interesting music. They would very much like to own our system but realistically it is way beyond what they could ever afford. In our first few years out of college we both had great paying first jobs and were spending about 60% (!)of our incomes on music (live, recorded, and gear). Talk about a HABIT.
Love of MUSIC or love of GEAR
I think the appeal of audio gear is more complicated than simply a love of music. In my experience I have not seen much of a correlation between the love of music and the pursuit of high-end gear. That is not to say that audiophiles do not necessarily love music – I think that they do (or they at least have some kind of aural fetish)– or the gear would not make sense to them. But if the full appreciation of music was dependant on hearing it played through the best gear, then musicians, composers, CBC FM radio hosts (yes, I am Canadian) – would all be audiophiles. As it stands, this is not the rule but the exception. (I would bet that there are more architects than musicians that have high-end systems.) I propose that the pursuit of high-end audio has something to do with an obsession with the POTENTIAL of gear to produce music. Wrapped up in this ‘potential’ are the aesthetics and physical appearance of the gear, its smell, feel, ergonomics, size and mass, technological innovation, myths associated with it, etc. The pursuit of gear in this context is its potential to offer a doorway to a world of music as expansive and rich as we can imagine, that we can open at will - by ourselves or with others who are willing to listen.