You certainly aren't alone! I find 128kbps unlistenable but I A/B tested 320 vs lossless and - nope, couldn't tell the difference, even trying hard to do so.

I consider myself an enthusiast/hobbyist, not an audiophile, and hold a pretty high level of scepticism about the truly devoted tbh.

That said I've never had the pleasure of listening to anything north of around the £10k mark, so I would love to be convinced of a genuine move-the-dial listening benefit of the really high end gear!

10-15k (mostly in speakers) is around when you start experiencing strongly diminishing returns.

Some really nice floorstanding speakers though offer a jaw dropping improvement that’s measurable.

I think the key to it is using the listening rooms that hi fi shops often offer, and being honest with oneself about whether the impact is really tangible or not.

Be a while before I can justify even contemplating that sort of hifi spend anyway so I shall proceed in blissful ignorance for now :-)

> 10-15k

Is that in USD?

whether that is any major western currency such as USD, EUR, CAD, CHF, GBP or AUD, it doesn't really matter when the error bar is that big

It could be JPY ;)

That's what I was wondering, as that amount in USD (or EUR/GBP etc) seems like a ridiculous amount of money to spend on speakers, even to me, a well off US-ian.

Uh.. while my comment was firmly tongue in cheek I don’t think you realise how ridiculous these things can get.

https://shop.martinshifi.co.uk/products/b-w-nautilus?variant...

Can be yours for the bargain price of GBP 57,750

Oh, a budget pair of speakers.

I think the gentleman is looking for something a bit more high class sir.

https://hifi-products.com/Transmission-Audio-Transmission-Au...

Thank you. Speakers that weigh more than a few cars and cost more than a nice condo in a major city are exactly what I was looking for.

Oh boy, you're in for a surprise, specially if you already know that there are people that buy golden toilets.

we are on an english speaking, western centric platform. what are the chances a non denominated amount to actually be in JPY ?

In the real world it is 15k yen.

That's the price of a Yamaha HS5 and some other speakers in that range.

And yep after that you definitely start getting diminishing returns.

https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Yamaha-HS5-Active-Monitor-Spea...

Yes, USD.

Lower that by an order of magnitude. Genelecs are some of the most common studio monitors and they are way less than that. A pair of JBL 308ps for $700 is the point of diminishing returns for accurate reproduction.

Only reason to spend more is aesthetics, features, and SPL (fair enough).

Most of the budget in high end production facilities goes into room design and acoustics.

So, two things:

1. Studio monitors are chosen for their flat response curve over a given range not because they: a) accurately cover a large frequency range including bass, b) have exceptional clarity and ultra low distortion. 2. Bookshelf speakers can get really good but they ultimately require subwoofers to cover lower frequencies and that requires not only a good subwoofer with excellent clarity. 3. The vast, vast majority of studios master audio to sound good on a wide range of devices ranging from smartphone speakers to earbuds to $50 soundbars. And ultimately with the "loudness wars" still in full swing, dynamic range compression is widely used.

I don't disagree with you that room treatment is of paramount importance. But there is a very, very noticeable difference hearing a good recording over a pair of floorstanding full range speakers with excellent tweeters+woofers and a decent amp. My point a good setup including subwoofer+crossovers+bookshelf speakers that hits the point of diminishing returns tends to approach the $10-15k mark including amp.

Some things are a total waste of money. Fancy power cables, super-expensive amps with zero measurements to justify the cost. Snake oil stuff like special ethernet cables, etc.

But speakers, as the highest distortion element of the audio chain, absolutely improve noticeably even up to $10-15k or so. I purchased some GoldenEar Triton One.R speakers a few years ago and they still blow people's minds when they listen to them. Everything from the bass to the treble are crystal clear yet not fatiguing.

> absolutely improve noticeably even up to $10-15k

Except, they don't. The only reason to buy a 15k speaker is to gain a higher SPL before distortion kicks in, or you want some cool feature or aesthetics.

For a home user just seeking good (accurate) music reproduction, there is not much point to spending more than a couple grand on a 2.1 system.

Beyond that, you are best to spend money on EQ, then room treatments and extra subs to try and sort out the low end (the most challenging aspect of music reproduction).

> there is not much point to spending more than a couple grand on a 2.1 system. Well, that's a personal choice right? Improvements are noticeable up to the point I mentioned. But is it worth it? Nobody can possibly answer that for you.

There are actually some streaming services offering atmos and high-res audio, so the market is actually quite interesting right now if you have the budget for the equipment. A top of the line experience will cost you a bit north of $1000 per channel assuming you dont get too picky with the speakers, do would be 7+2 -> 9K for a full blown domestic system. The audiophile crowd is buying 2 channel dac systems at a third of that value, just because.

> . 3. The vast, vast majority of studios master audio to sound good on a wide range of devices ranging from smartphone speakers to earbuds to $50 soundbars.

Great. So I really don't need the expensive stuff then. It will actually be a distortion of what the engineer intended

You don't need the super-expensive stuff anyways. But you're obviously not going to get full frequency range (especially bass) on smartphone speakers.

Additionally, a few genres (notably some jazz and Western classical) as well as select recordings here and there actually do not have "loudness war" issues and might actually have good dynamics. For these, it's nice to have a system that can handle, say, the full blown volume swings of a Romantic-era symphony.

You can probably fulfill these requirements with a system far under $15K. :)

I actually was under the impression that the audiophile market (at least the stereotypical) was fairly "dead"; it was more of a thing in, say, the 1970s-1980s phenomenon (with a follow-up in the late 1990s with the home theater boom) when the gap between consumer electronics and hi-end electronics was a lot bigger, and there was a lot less technical information out there (so mythology over things like cables and flowery descriptions of sound were more rampant).

A pair of Genelec 8351 is around 7000 USD. Add a subwoofer and you’re not too far from 10k.

There’s also many other brands in high end production facilities like for example ATC which easily exceed 10-15k a pair.

But consider also the (IMO irrational) devaluing of 'used' items in the USA. I have a great sounding set of older high end floor speakers I pulled for free from a dumpster... one subwoofer had a small tear in it, and I was able to glue that up with no apparent sound quality degradation, and then later replace the entire sub when one came up cheap on eBay.

I often see fairly high quality floor speakers for near free at thrift stores, etc.

To be fair, I am talking about things that were probably $1-2k new, and I don't feel that I could personally tell the difference from that and something $10k new. Especially with the real world high noise floor- vehicles outside, pets, kids, etc.

There used to be an ABX plugin for Foobar, where you could test yourself if you could make out the difference between an MP3 of your choice and a lossless one.

I think I scored worse than a coin flip when it came to 320 files

If you scored worse than a coin flip, then you are successfully able to distinguish 320kbps from lossless, which is a rare feat in human beings! (Just invert your answer for the correct one.)

If you cannot distinguish, you will be the same as a coin flip; i.e. random.

Hah! Never thought of that. Nice one

Studies have shown that people that grew up listening to compressed audio tend to rate it as 'better' than lossless, which is kind of sad/amazing.

Anyway, not to take this sub-thread too seriously, but obviously it depends how reproducible your deviation from 50-50 is :-)

Buddy of mine has a $20k pair of monitors in a soundproofed room, and I was able to A/B 320 vs lossless on that system only, and only on certain types of material. The difference was only evident in the very high frequencies, and I really had to focus to tell.

>The difference was only evident in the very high frequencies, and I really had to focus to tell.

This becomes a curse if you practice it too often. Yes, if you strain your ears during cymbal crashes, you'll hear warbly bits in compressed audio, especially if that's all you're looking for. And then you'll start hearing it everywhere. In terms of casual playback, it's not terribly important, and if you don't tune your ears, it won't matter. (Lossless is important for archival copies though, IMO)

My favorite/worst example of falling into this trap occurred for me when I was mixing an EP by my band. We had terrible recording equipment, so I was trying my 22-year-old best to carve something workable out with EQ and panning and whatnot. On the kick drum, I wanted the 'click' of the beater hitting the head, but it accentuated this squeak that my pedal made every time I hit it. I spent a little too long trying to cut this squeak out, to little avail. It was like an icepick in my ears, but no one else in the band could hear it.

Later that day, I got in the car and put in a CD by the band Cake (this being the early 2000s) - one that I'd heard countless times. On this playthrough though, clear as day, I heard the squeak of the drummer's kick pedal.

I switched to pure electronic music for weeks just to cleanse my palette.

Hah! Been there, except for me it was with pure electronic music. Too much tweaking and then you come back later and go "WTF was I thinking!"

I love the squeaky bass drum in some Led Zeppelin records. Adds to the charm.

I worked on a big studio in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it was kinda funny how professionals have (or at least had) an attitude of just not caring about those things. Try to fix with a gate in about 10 seconds, if it doesn't work just turn it down a bit. Or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think you're describing the audio engineer and producer equivalent of "perfect is the enemy of good". Creating an overall sound which is appealing, expressive and characterful is much more important than nailing down every detail.

Yep, that's exactly it. Audio engineering is heavily affected by diminishing returns, since spending hours mixing a song is a sure-shot way of ensuring your ears will be fatigued at the end and the result will be sub-par.

    That said I've never had the pleasure of listening 
    to anything north of around the £10k mark

I've listened to gear well north of that and I certainly don't have "golden ears" (I don't think many do) but the TL;DR is that you hit diminishing returns way before £10k.

Ultimately, we're talking about signal reproduction here, and inexpensive gear can put out some seriously accurate sound thanks to onboard DSP processing that uses software to compensate for less than amazing hardware. As long as the sound reaching your ears is correct, doesn't matter how it was achieved.

The one thing you can potentially gain once you get in to the realm of paying thousands of dollars is oodles of power from the amplifier and oodles of power handling from the speakers, which may or may not let you begin to approximate the sound of live music.

If you have ever had the pleasure of hearing an orchestra perform live, the average SPL (sound pressure level) may not be that high, but the fleeting momentary peaks from something like a timpani might be north of 100dB. That's a bit of a feat for your stereo system to pull off and there's no substitute for horsepower there.

But even then, this doesn't necessarily cost megabucks.

Good point. If you are entertaining a large party, you can expect to pay a lot more for quality too, for similar reasons.

Yes. And for large rooms, IME dealing with the room itself quickly becomes the challenge.

I heard this system in person at this event. A million dollars of objectively great gear, and the end result was it sounded like the PA system at a high school football game.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/vac-statement-452iq-powe...

The reflections in that room were a nightmare. Look at the giant glass wall behind the seating area, perpendicular to the speakers. Holy jesus. So you have the speakers putting out some massive waves, and then you have waves reflecting off of the glass wall with nearly equal energy, and then you have everything coming together and canceling out and/or creating resonances... right at the seating area. Absolutely insane, absolutely pathological.

I think the main sell of hidef audio isn't so much the 'extra bits' but usually they're different masters, and not compressed for CD. A lot of it is in the mind though for sure. Almost anything sounds pretty good on good (>500 euro) headphones. :}

I don't think you're alone at all (I'm in that range, for one) I just think people liking good audio without spending a ton doesn't grab a lot of attention. There are decent articles on headphones in the $60-300 range, mobile DACs that don't break the bank, etc, that I think show that our contingent is alive and well.

> But I cannot notice a major difference between the $100 system, and say a $100k system (or whatever audiophiles spend).

You definitely will, but at lot of it will come from the fact that the latter system will be set up well in an isolated room with proper speaker placement, while the former will be some speakers thrown in a living wherever they fit.

Sensitive speakers are the huge difference, because they will give you more detail at normal listening amplifications. A good pair of speakers and 25-50W of amplification power is more than enough for most domestic scenarios, and even then you'll be using it with volume in half. The difference are the speakers - and sensitive speakers are expensive compared to a "$100 system"

I do not think that it is a controversial opinion to say that a floor speaker sounds better than a phone speaker.

I OP means most people really just don't care

Are headphones, sound bars, and the like not an enormous market segment? Do you think people wouldn't notice if a cinema replaced their 10.2 surround with a couple of phone speakers?

This reads like "I feel totally alone in diverging from the norm that microwave TV dinners are as good as any other food, I much prefer home cooked meals". Like... that's not a controversial opinion, that's normal. OP taking an elitist stance about doing something that everybody else does and having an opinion that everybody else agrees with.

30 years ago members of the general public spent money on home stereos with good speakers. Photos, videos, and movies from the 80s of male teenagers' rooms all had at least decent stereos if not pretty good stereos.

And now they don't. Your comment conflates two things: what people agree is true vs what people do. Everyone knows that decent stereos or audio setups sound better than phone speakers. That isn't up for debate. But they stopped buying decent amplifiers and speakers because music precipitously dropped as a cultural cornerstone with the mainstreaming of the Internet. If you ask someone with headphones on today what they're listening to, it's just as likely to be music as it is to be podcasts, news, youtube videos about video games, or youtube videos about a random topic that you would never think people would care that much about.

> Do you think people wouldn't notice if a cinema replaced their 10.2 surround with a couple of phone speakers?

This is actually a pretty good example. Obviously they would notice. But it turns out that they don't actually care very much: the masses are perfectly happy to watch shows and movies on tiny screens with terrible audio.

I think a lot of people elsewhere in this thread are confusing a simple majority of the whole population, with a large minority which obviously does care enough about audio but is nevertheless a minority.

25% of US adults, say, spending on audio gear may be a huge market segment, but it's still a minority!

This is just false. People tolerate watching things on small screens without good audio, sure, but that doesn't mean people prefer it. TVs are still found in every home even though they are rarely hooked up to anything other than internet streaming any more.

The reason sound systems aren't as popular as they were in the 80s is that most modern TVs come with decent stereo sound, and bluetooth headphones are excellent. People are buying decent amplifiers and speakers, built in to other things because manufacturers know that they will get more sales if they make the built-in audio quality of their devices better.

What did I write that is false? You didn't actually contradict any of it. You wrote about what people prefer and I wrote about what people do.

> People tolerate watching things on small screens without good audio, sure, but that doesn't mean people prefer it.

Their actions indicate their preferences. If they're doing it a certain way then they, by definition, prefer to do it that way. No one is forcing them to do otherwise. Audio equipment is not expensive.

I don't think that's true either, because most people I know (even ones who don't have tons of disposable income) have invested in some form of speaker system or headphones. I don't know anybody who just listens to music from their phone speakers.

I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent.

> I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent.

The original airpods did not sound good at all, so I don't see what your point is here. Yes, they're still better than phone speakers, but if people actually cared about quality they wouldn't sell as much.

> The original airpods did not sound good at all, so I don't see what your point is here. Yes, they're still better than phone speakers, but if people actually cared about quality they wouldn't sell as much.

The point is that there's a $100b+ industry towards selling audio devices.

You can debate to what extent people care about audio quality, and what tradeoffs they're willing to make for better quality, but you can't deny that the majority of people appreciate that phone speakers are not the optimal audio setup.

If people didn't care about quality, they wouldn't put in the money, effort, discomfort, and fuss to use airpods instead of their phone speakers.

It really depends on you define "most people". Most people have an IQ of less than 100.

So pretentious.

I don't ask people for their IQ score before I spend time with them, but this has held true across the entire cross-section of society that I've personally experienced. When I was working as a dishwasher, everyone would bring small Bluetooth speakers to their area if they wanted to listen to music.

Do you think that people with a certain background / IQ score are not enlightened enough to recognize tinniness or poor sound quality?

You're misinterpreting my comment. I was not implying any correlation between IQs and audiophile-ness. I was pulling out a random example of a counter-intuitive property that "most people" have, though it's clear from your response that I picked a bad example.

Ah gotcha, apologies for misinterpreting.

I can't claim to speak for everybody, but I think that as high-end (relative to previous standards) audio tech has become very mainstream over the last decade or two, most people recognize that the default phone/laptop speaker setup isn't ideal.

By definition, no they don't.

Its actually not true, but is that relevant? Can't a simpleton of IQ 60 be the bearer of golden ears? You seem to equate variable "measurable puzzle-solving skills" with common sense and capacity to act on a specific domain; please don't do it, because it makes the rest of us feel sorry for you.

In my experience, most people will choose to listen to music directly from a phone or laptop even when there is a good floor speaker system in the same room they could connect to and play through in seconds, because they just don't care.

In what context?

If you're talking about someone hosting a party where they're playing music off their phone/laptop, that's something I've never personally seen before lol

I'm talking about my family members and girlfriend playing music or movies in a room where I have a great stereo system, and not connecting to it, even though they are already paired and just need to click the icon.

I think you hit the nail on the head- people think a big stereo is for volume levels, not quality. They will obviously switch to it when they want things louder, but often not before.

You must not have normies in your life. I'm subjected to cell phone and laptop speakers constantly.

Not sure what your definition of normie is, but that's been my experience across a fairly wide spectrum of US society.

When I went to public high school in rural America, pretty much everyone I knew owned some sort of headphone/speaker system, and they would be used at every party / larger gathering where audio was important.

It depends on the context though. Obviously if someone is just sharing something casual like a Youtube video on their phone, they're going to use the built-in speakers.

Hmm, I know a lot of people who just use the earbuds that came with their phone. I guess those aren’t included nowadays, but for a while there it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that most people had never bought a pair of headphones.

But like always “most” depends on the population. Most people would have no opinions or nonsense opinions on programming languages I guess, because most people have never written a line of code. It doesn’t tell us much about the popular programming languages, the general population is just the wrong one to sample for that kind of info.

>I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent

Considering the top100, yah, no one cares about audio quality. Airpods are a symbol of status, not a relevant audio accessory, and from a hifi perspective, they are shit. Im not saying they dont sound good, what Im saying is that equalization does miracles when the sound isn't there. The compression format is lossy.

Tiny class-d amps, containing barely $20 worth of parts, produce perfect (to my ears) sound. I don't know why receivers are still so expensive, but I suspect it's a total racket (literal price fixing).

On the other hand, TVs, sound bars, and the HomePod mini produce audio so bad I can't believe people put up with it.

> On the other hand, TVs, sound bars, and the HomePod mini produce audio so bad I can't believe people put up with it.

I can chime in on this one. I used to be like OP: Not an audiophile, but someone who can appreciate the difference between a $1000 setup and a $100 setup. Once I got married, and someone with better interior decorating taste started having a vote on home decor, that appreciation had to go out the window. Nobody with any taste wants floor-standing big ugly black boxes positioned at the "Optimal" listening positions in the living room. Do an image search for "high end speakers". Yuck.

Now days, receivers are much more of a home theater setup and less of an audio setup, if that makes sense. Lots of 4k upscaling, DSP for video, and handling the different standards like Dolby Vision and Atmos. If you're just looking for something to play music, you can get a lot of amazing receivers from the late 80s - 00s for pennies on the dollar.

Sounds like haudiosciencereview.com might be your crowd. There are a lot of us science minded audiophiles!

Your position is completely reasonable.

It's just that most loonies like to argue more than most sane people care to respond.

> But I cannot notice a major difference between the $100 system, and say a $100k system (or whatever audiophiles spend).

I more or less agree with this but the main problem is that people listen in untreated rooms with horrible acoustics.

Once you hit that "medium good" threshold, which is pretty easy these days, more expensive speakers aren't going to make a difference until you get your acoustics under control.

If you do have a nice room, you will definitely notice the difference between the medium good setup and a nicer one, although you will hit diminishing returns WAY before you reach the $100k speakers.

absolutely and whether you think you care about sound quality or not, one thing I have found is that it makes a huge difference for dialog clarity. I watched Dune when it came out in a brand new theater in Los Angeles and then a few months later on my home system. I was quite surprised by how much more of the dialog was intelligible than I had thought

The money is irrelevant.

The biggest differences are almost universally going to be detected when you move from a loudspeaker with minimal volume to one with large volume.

Basic physics, dimensions of rooms, etc are way more important than anything else.

Sure - more lumber costs more, but there are clever ways around this too.

I can genuinely tell the difference between 320K MP3 and CD, and between CD and HD, (a group of enthusiasts got together and double-blind tested each other) but only in carefully controlled circumstances with a LOT of focus. As in, wearing really good headphones in a silent distraction-free room with my eyes closed and focusing on particular features like cymbals and chimes and staging, and even then only after switching back and forth between samples a dozen times. So after realizing that, I always aim to have CD quality, but I couldn't care less about HD audio. And like you said, $100 Craigslist systems from 1990 sound drastically better than modern consumer-grade systems. People started caring more about "smart" convenience features and less about sound quality a long time ago.

That's the way with so many things, huh? I got a one of the nicer sets of Logitech computer speakers, and while it's not amazing, it's fine, and definitely better than the junky speakers that use to come with desktop systems. I can tell the difference between $.99 coffee and $3 coffee, but $50 coffee is lost on me. A $10 wine is likely to be better than Three Buck Chuck, but I don't know if I could tell the difference between $10 and $100.

For almost everything, unless you're really, really into that thing, there's a segment of the price curve where more money == more better, but afterward you're just shoveling cash into a black hole.

There is a lot of diminishing returns for audiophile products.

You should be able to hear the difference between a $100 speaker system and a $1,000 speaker system.

But there are other things like room acoustics and stuff that can cause issues. If you put a really good system in a bad room I could imagine it would be harder to tell a difference.

$1,000 to $10,000 might be a lot harder to tell the difference assuming you sourced a good performing setup at each price point.

Same for MP3 vs Lossless, you could probably hear the difference between 320Kbps on specific songs if you know what to listen for but I doubt you can hear it on everything and you would have to concentrate pretty hard rather than enjoying the music.

I think that fundamentally, everyone agrees that there are diminishing returns with audio products, people just have different tolerances for bad audio, different amounts of fucks to give about it, and different levels of ability to configure their setups. I don't know what the distribution of people looks like along those axes, but you sound "normal" to me in regards to taste, and by virtue of being on this forum are probably above average in regards to technical ability to configure things. Lots of people would probably find it a bit too much trouble to worry about and configure the external audio receiver and freestanding floor speakers (which incidentally describes my setup as well), but I don't think that's equivalent to them not recognizing the improvement. Sound bars seem to be deliberately intended to fill the market segment for people who want and can afford better sound, but can't manage the configuration.

Same here! We stopped using laptop speakers around 5 or so years ago when we got some good bookshelf speakers[0] instead. We mounted them to the foot of our bed where we use our laptop.

We've since built our own subwoofer and also mounted a bass shaker[1] (transducer) below the bed, which produces actual vibrations in response to low frequencies, by moving a heavy weight instead of a speaker cone.

The tactile stimulation from low frequencies actually significantly helps with immersion, focus, and relaxation, similar to some can easily fall asleep in a running car.

Of course, it also helps when we're just in the mood to transmit high-power bass frequencies straight into our fricken' bones...

Anyway, I think the total for our sound system is below $1k. We never made a parts list for our subwoofer but we estimate the cost to have been around $300–400. The rest of the system consists of the $180 (at the time) bookshelf speakers[0], the $50 (at the time) bass shaker[1], and the $80 (or so) amplifier to drive said shaker[2].

We also use a device called a "line driver"[3] (around $20) to raise the signal level for the input to our bass shaker's amplifier. "Line driver" is indeed the magic search term, and "preamp" will get you garbage (either $2 op-amp boards, or phonographs).

But aside from all the engineering effort that went into it, because it was a really fun hobby project, it's mostly just a mediocre system. We're totally content with that, and proud because it is a great experience for us, and very fun to listen to.

At this point, the only upgrade we would really want would be to find a new living space that can accommodate a rotary woofer[4], which changes the air pressure of the entire room to produce frequencies from around 20Hz down to even 0Hz.

But our current setup is more than enough to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate. <3

Also we store our entire music library in mp3 format >:3

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GMPDAHM

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CDDPJTI

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TTMN51V

[3]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/271412659106

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_woofer

-Emily

I think there are a lot of us, but we aren't very visible because we just buy some best-bang-for-the-buck equipment to get us above trash-tier sound, or hit a few pawn shops, get set up to our satisfaction, then don't think about it again. Shit lasts decades, once you hit good-enough there's not much reason to keep messing with it. Only thing you might be replacing about once a decade is headphones—maybe.

I'm in the same camp. I consider myself an audiophile, but spend most of my time reading things and laughing at "them". There's definitely a fair bit of critical thinking required when you're investigating audio gear for personal use. That said, a proper DAC/Amp stack and a good set of headphones are well worth the investment, it's just that you are strongly into the diminishing returns area once you spend more than about $1k all-in on the entire setup.

The thing is, I think of it like I do many of my "hobbies" which are really just about improving my actual quality of experience/quality of life in the things I do every day. I am typing this comment on a custom-built $900 mechanical keyboard, and just got off a conference call where I was speaking into $1k worth of microphone gear, with a $3k camera setup pointed at me, and listening to the other person through $2k worth of audio output gear (headphones + DAC/Amp stack). To the casual observer that's utterly ridiculous and I've wasted all this money for nothing. On the other hand, I spend 8+ hours a day wearing those headphones, on meetings, and typing, anything that even marginally improves the quality of my experience doing the things I do for 8+ hours every day and intend to do for most of the remainder of my life, means that I am improving my overall quality of life in a meaningful way.

I do this for the exact same reason I spent big on my chair, desk, lighting, and my bed. Between my home office and my bedroom, I spend 75% or more of my entire life (roughly 18 out of every 24 hours) in those two places until I retire. It is absolutely worthwhile for people who spend a lot of time listening to audio to optimize the way they listen to audio. You just have to really keep your critical thinking hat on, though, because the market is full of snake oil.

    I've always felt totally alone falling somewhere between 
    hardcore audiophiles

To me, the "hardcore" audiophiles are the ones who understand a bit of actual science & engineering and don't go chasing ridiculous crap like audiophile USB cables.

The lunatic fringe gets all the attention, because they're comically delusional, but they are not hardcore to me.

    or whatever audiophiles spend

Bought new, the modern equivalent of that $100 Craigslist system is (vast simplification and approximation) about $500. A well-researched $500-$2500 (new) stereo system is in my experience and opinion the range where you get appreciably better and better sound.

At $500 you are already getting a system that is not doing a whole lot wrong. But not massive output or deep deep bass.

By $2500 you're getting something that's doing very close to the full 17hz-20khz at output levels that will more than exceed just about any reasonable residential situation. And in fact your listening room is the bottleneck now.

Above that price you're paying for very boutiquey exotic stuff that can pull off certain tricks, very high levels of output, etc.

Those prices are very approximate and assume a well researched and set up system.

You certainly aren't getting any speaker going correctly to 17 Hz even for ten times this price.

Stereo speakers are not made to go very low, that's what a subwoofer is for. Not all subwoofers even go that low!

Above $2500 for a good stereo system will get you a better sound, but as always, the more you pay, the less you'll be able to hear the difference. Also, the better the sound is, the more you'll have to be careful about amp pairing and room acoustic.

Right. I was including subwoofers in the cost of those systems approaching $2500. It's a broad topic, of course, and I'd already typed a zillion words. It's always a challenge what to type and what to leave out, huh?

A stereo system with subwoofers is still a stereo to me. My main system is 2.2 and I call it a stereo. But I see the confusion. Some people don't call it a "stereo" unless it's strictly 2.0!

Define "correctly". Frequency correct or audible correct? While 17hz is the floor for audible frequencies, even if you can hear it, you won't be able to perceive that much detail. In fact, I'd argue that a $2500 system with a subwoofer will sound the same as a $250 subwoofer, assuming the same sensitivity. Thing is, human ears are crap (imagine low-res gif pictures and thinking of it as 8k frames), and very very bad below 100Hz. What better/more expensive systems have (besides better quality components) is often better sensitivity, so a passing its not audible on your $100 system becames audible - not because frequency - but because sensititity (the cone is actually able to reproduce the faint sound)

You can notice the compression at the edges of the audio, like vocals or cymbals. Linda Ronstadt is one singer who's voice makes compression obvious - her line turns into a hacksaw blade on some songs.

That said, every system has distortion - the question is what sound do you like/want. Do you want a sound that's more forward or more laid back? Do you like more midrange? Vocals?

Audio also becomes more complicated because of hearing loss. I can't hear anything over 12-13k, so I'm sure that's affected my audio setup at some level.