Realistically, as long as you are enjoying the art, how you are enjoying it should be irrelevant.

I often make the point to people that a terrible movie will be terrible no matter how you watch it - HDR, 4K, Atmos won’t make a difference. A crappy movie, will always be a crappy movie.

The same with music, and inversely - a great song will still sound great and enjoyable on a really crappy car stereo.

On the other, a decent home theatre amplifier and set of speakers is going to blow away a sound bar. I think people who think "it all sounds the same" have never heard a really good stereo. I have an alright, but far from high end, stereo set up in a listening environment in my basement, and everyone I've ever listened to music with down there is blown away.

I’d never, ever, want to see high end audio equipment die. When it all works together, the experience is truly sublime, engrossing and immersive like nothing else.

The pro side has some weird beliefs and desires too though, like an obsession with vintage gear including stuff like early digital reverbs. Plenty of pros believe that Mogami Gold cables are actually better in terms of sound quality, but my studio is wired up with Canare star quad for the extra noise rejection and a lot of GLS plus some Hosa patch cables as I’ve found their connectors to be good-enough quality and the cables are generally easy enough to work with / durable without being overly expensive. Megabuck old-school gear like LA-2As, 1176es, Neve 1073s, Neumann U67 and more-recent Sony C800-G mics, Manley compressors, etc all have crazy followings and people are always GASing for them, but they won’t make a crap song magically sound good, only take an already-good song and take it up another 10% (and even then only in skilled hands). So much more can be achieved by most folks with just more practice and education around mixing, yet everyone wants to spend their way to better sound.

Instruments and their amps are arguably even worse, with guitar and synth players as large contributors (I’m guilty as heck here too). We always want that perfect axe that we somehow believe will take us to the next level, or that vintage CS-80 or Rhodes. We know we’d be better off practicing and learning our instruments better, but instead we endlessly tweak Kemper profiles, swap strings / pickups / picks, rewire pedal boards, rearrange modular synths, and most importantly, read, talk about, and pine for the next gear purchase. It’s madness. There’s even a joke in the modular community that making music is the least important part of modular synths. “Music? Never heard of it. My $8000 electronic mission center only does microtonal bleeps and bloops in Euclidean cycles.”

But anyway, hobbies are fun. Sad to see Onkyo go, but not that sad as I never actually owned any of their gear. They seemed like a cheaper Denon. I was always more into the DIY side of home audio before I switched to pro gear, with folks like Nelson Pass and Siegfried Linkwitz as personal heroes. Don’t forget Roger Linn and Daphne Oram on the creation side!

Seconding this. A friend of mine had a pair of ATC SCM25As, and they blew me away. I had never heard music like that before (and I'd been producing music for a decade prior on mid-range professional gear). I didn't have 20k to drop, but I did have $2k, so I got a nice pair of headphones + a little desktop DAC+Amp setup, and I'm about 90% as happy.

I literally did not know what I was missing. And I consider myself fairly pragmatic about audiophile stuff.

As a side note, this friend was also super into vintage gear, but for different reasons than you mention... for him, vintage gear is how he could take tax writeoffs in his industry (video games), where finding things to expense is fairly difficult. A $50k vintage compressor is an easy loss on the balance sheet, then you sell it later for what you paid, or more. Similar to how art works on the high end.

As far as cables etc are concerned, I personally have a very weird situation, where I have a large radio transmitter on the roof above my apartment. I've found that audio gear involving amplification (turntable pre-amps especially) are very very sensitive to RF interference from the transmitters above me. So I've spent more time than I'd have liked swapping out parts to ensure my entire chain is properly shielded from interference (e.g. I had to get rid of an otherwise great Schiit turntable preamp because it picked up too much noise). Really uncommon and frustrating thing to deal with.

For movies, I watched a cam rip once. The experience was so bad I vowed never again. And the weird bit is all the distortions were like only half-perceptable (warbly audio, mild shadows / reflections from people walking near the camera), so I would just feel like something was wrong but couldn't immediately place it.

Edit: the car case is particularly funny as many luxury brands offer $$$$-$$$$$ options for better sound systems when they can’t solve the fundamental flaws of compromised placement and background noise inherent to cars. That McIntosh system in your new $120k Jeep Grand Wagoneer might impress the neighbor but it still won’t do much to quiet the roar of real all-terrain tires on the highway.

Not really agree on this one. I would say you will still like it and maybe enjoy it because this is the only way you can enjoy it while driving. But that doesn't mean it sound great.

The issue is that most music is overcompressed these days to make up for the fact that most people are listening to music in hostile environment or with bad devices. Which make the difference with higher fidelity equipment less important. Without being an audiophile I have records from the 90's that only felt so great on headphones or decent hifi. The music was less compressed these days, there were much higher amplitude difference between parts of the song, instruments. Back in the days listening on the radio felt weird and flat. We just lowered the bar to the point that everything feel weird and flat. Like fast food or premade dishes that only have a general way too salty or too sweet tastes where your palate cannot do the sorting anymore of the different ingredients that have been put to it.

I still think a decent hifi equipment would make a ton of difference for someone into classical records. Modern POP music? Waste of money.

You are talking about the extreme kind of audiophiles that aren't really representative of the community, which covers a wide spectrum of people. It's like saying all developers are socially awkward loners. Merely a stereotype.

> I often make the point to people that a terrible movie will be terrible no matter how you watch it - HDR, 4K, Atmos won’t make a difference. A crappy movie, will always be a crappy movie.

Of course. Noone would argue against that. However a great movie really shines on good equipment. Imagine watching Blade Runner 2049 on a laptop display. No amount of convenience is making that experience worthwhile in my opinion.

I watched most of the 'classic' movie canon (including the original Blade Runner) on rented VHS tapes and a cheap CRT TV, and many of those where among the most 'worthwhile' movie watching experiences in my life. A great movie will 'shine' on any equipment.