Musico-audio experience

You don't need to pick 'n choose.  Enjoy 'm both. Just be a bit more tolerant of the fact that hi-fi quality and musical quality don't coincide quite as often as you might like.

I fell into audio obsession by accident.  
Never cared at all in my teens, 20s, or early 30s.  
Long story short, I ended up down the rabbit hole.  
Years later, I’m finally out the other side.  
I’ve accepted that for a multitude of reasons I am prone to being obsessive with music and that this is part of my personality.  
Those years sweating, fretting, angsting, toiling in both miserable anxiety from audio nervosa and sweating over the minutiae of every conceivable detail of audio reproduction I will never get back.  
Could have been spent enjoying music.  
I don’t want to return to that so I took years off the stuff.  
Now I can deal with my proclivity to be inordinately bothered by poor audio, still appreciate good-sounding stuff, and actually just enjoy the damn music fer Chrissakes 

I'm perfectly fine listening to someone else's music system at either a commercial establishment or another person's house, as long as the bass isn't too thuddy and the volume isn't too high. It's only with my stereo that I'm driven nuts if things aren't as good as I think they ought to be.

@rvpiano

I think I understand your point. I think many of us loved music when young and were drawn to hear it better, This would kick in our analytical skills and we would start listening to the system instead of the music.

But really enjoying an audio system is about listening to music. I turned from technically detailed systems with great slam fifteen or twenty years ago and worked towards the musical system I own today that simply draws me into the music… every day for hours. I don’t think or care about slam, or micro details… but am emotionally drawn into the beauty of the music. Audio-nirvana.

@ghdprentice 

I think, considering your considerable expenditure, that you too are invested in the sound as much as the music.  It’s the combination that fosters your “audio nirvana.”