Wasted Years.

I know this will upset someone, but an AUDIOPHILE does not care about music.- it's a HOBBY. And that's OK, because I started out with an AM-only transistor radio my aunt bought for me with an earphone and I loved listening to top-40 music for hours. My 1st upgrade was finding out which 9-volt lasted the longest. I don't care about sound until I decide to focus on Sound-Quality as an end in itself. THEN I want the best recorded music (usually classical for my tastes) and acoustic instruments have the most timbral information. When I heard a truly great pair of speakers (surprise- the room had NO acoustical treatments, but it was a good vinyl record on a $30,000 turntable) I knew if I had the money it would be a future goal worth pursuing. But for music alone, I don't need much of anything. The only other thing that's important is if you're having fun then there's no problem. If it becomes an obsession and you can't relax and enjoy yourself, then you need to find something else that's giving you what you need.








My

@soix  I have almost 61,100 LPs/CDs/78s some R2R and some cassettes

I kept pursuing better quality audio equipment that allows me to enjoy more of my lesser sonic quality recordings, from the acoustic era (Pre-1925) to the current digital recording era.  As an amateur singer and recording engineer, I've sung and recorded 1000s of performances from Disney Hall to Royce Hall to Ford Ampitheater to many synagogues and churches.  If a recording (music in particular) doesn't meet with my approval, I dispose of it (18,000 to date, 10,000 more probably).  I've upgraded up system to the point where a greatly over reverberant, shallow, greyish sounding modern recording will more likely be tossed as it would sound even worse or terrible on lesser equipment.  I may have tossed some lesser sonic quality recordings in the past 6 decades that could sound perfectly fine today.  See my equipment for why I treasure so many great to even sonically mediocre recordings. 

You can do both things and love doing both. I assume that's what most of us do. They're not mutually exclusive.