" I would have to ask: Can one be an audiophile without caring at all about the equipment?
I love music, first and foremost. I love the community that it engenders, the primal power that it has to move human beings across time and space in a way that can’t be matched by other forms of art.
I have found that beautiful, artistic, meaningful music, played skillfully, sounds better on thoughtfully designed reproduction equipment. So, To a point, I enjoy pursuing the kinds of knowledge and insight an audiophile cultivates.
Only to a point though. At some point, the quality of reproduction is not really the focus, there is not enough music that, if reproduced at absolute fidelity to the source, is actually worth hearing at that level of clarity. The focus becomes the process of reproduction, and from where I stand (a guy who neither knows enough to be a truly informed shopper for $10,000 amplifiers, nor enough to work on one) are extremely dedicated to the technical aspects of being and “Audiophile”. I wonder; though, whether they give a damn about music? "
I would say yes but then how do you feed the resultant desire to hear good fidelity music? It does require thoughtfully designed and assembled equipment.
I think you can reach a point where you are satisfied with what you have and the tinkering stops and then the search never ends for well engineered recordings. For me the metric is how close can I get to a live performance where the acoustics are good or where I want to remember what it was like to be there, which often means not so perfect recordings but there is a sound I want.
I really like the things you say and yes I believe there is a point in time where the technical aspects can over run the audio quality. Then you have achieved some sort of "tonally pure" electronic standard but have lost the life of it all. Really fine audio does not have to cost a lot but to do this you need to know more than the average guy or have some good advice.