If you were serious about sound you would...

I really don't care about reproducing the exact sound of the recording equipment since 80% of my 2k+ collection of older vinyl is far from sounding perfect to my ears. In fact about 50% sounds mediocre to poor. Hence I have both a Loki Max and a Puffin in my system. Puffin for secondary TT, Max for everything digital. Primary TT is only pure unaltered sound source on which I only play the 20% of my vinyl that meets my ears criteria as is. Recording quality is a crapshoot. Not so much poor equipment, but poor engineering and mastering. Why not tweaking their deficiencies.  

And of course, perfect audio equipment, studio or home kind, will never sound to their full potential unless installed in a properly built and setup listening room. 

"If you were serious about sound you would..."

...post over 20000 times in a hifi forum.  Thank you!

@mapman Great answer, but do you care about the most accurate sound or do you care about your enjoyment of music accurate sound be damned? Obviously you have given your expertise to the audiophile world which all around here appreciate. One of those branches is objective the other is subjective, your objective experience and commitment to audio is valuable but to me your subjective commitment to audio is only valuable is your ideas line up to my subjective ideas promoting confirmation bias something only the marketing department of audio manufactures need. I would really like your answer I don't think there is a right or wrong answer. 

I know very little about how a recording engineer captures and mixes an artist, and I know absolutely nothing about the Pro Audio choices recording engineers make to practice their craft. Since this is a forum, and everyone has an opinion, here are my two cents.

My guess is that a recording engineer wants to hear everything with the greatest detail possible when recording an artist. The engineer then takes those tracks and modifies them if working in the digital domain, according to the engineer's and artists' tastes. And now, above all, the engineer wants to hear in great detail what effects the the digital processing have produced. Then, there is the whole process of volume control for the individual tracks. This is done for analog recording also, or adjusting where artists stand or microphone position if recording a "live" performance. I see this akin to a cook deciding on more or less salt. The engineer is messing with how much each track proportionally contributes to the final mix. Yet again, the engineer wants to hear exactly what these modifications have done to the mix. So I am naively assuming that the engineer wants a playback chain that is extremely fast and highly detailed. Whether the playback system "sounds good" is of secondary importance. I do not think that equipment used in a recording studio is even designed to appeal to the tastes of the majority of home users.

And finally, it is we, the consumers, who purchase the final mix and play it at home. And, no surprise, we all like flavors, different flavors. As consumers of audio gear, I think what we do over time is refine what flavors we like, and if we are lucky, we find equipment that reproduce those flavors for us. If we are luckier still, we are able to afford the equipment that checks all those flavor boxes for us.

So to answer the question of the post, "If you were serious about sound you would..." I would continue listen to as much gear and as many home systems as I can and see if said gear and systems appeal to my flavor profile. Then figure out what gear contributes the most to my tastes, and then figure out how to recreate that sound in my home. Most of us reach a point where it is "good enough", or we run out of money. In summary, I have no interest in the Pro Audio gear choices an engineer makes (but I think the whole process is fascinating and I would love to see the process in action), and neither should you. What we care about a recording is whether it sounds good on our flavored home system, and that it has just enough salt and not too much coriander.

@donavabdear 

do you care about the most accurate sound or do you care about your enjoyment of music accurate sound be damned?

I care about enjoyment of music.   Accuracy matters and I tend to find that the two are highly correlated.