Audiophilism is a hobby

For those who say they don’t understanding the issue or “the angst,” it is thus:  

As advantageous as high audio fidelity is, the processes by which the music lover achieves such is very often deleterious to actually loving the music. It’s hard to love the music when instead of just loving it one is very pre-occupied with the scrutiny of fidelity-related minutiae.  
Non-Audiophile Fred is just sitting there loving the music.  
Audiophile Billy is sitting there fretting about the distortion, the transient accuracy, the imaging, the soundstage, on and on and on and on….

Fred is actually enjoying the beauty, wonderment, emotional richness, mental stimulation, perhaps even transcendence that music provides.  
Billy is a ball of anxiety, angst and minutiae-scrutinizing madness.
That’s the issue and “the angst.” 

@tomcy6 No, pointing out the obvious fact that there are many audiophiles who play music and, instead of just enjoying the music, sit there and over-analyze fidelity-related minutiae, wherein dismay at disappointing fidelity is often the experience (just pursuing this very thread and hearing people say they won’t even listen to music, no matter how good, unless it has ‘good sound,’ will indicate this), is not a “straw man argument.”  
For one, it wasn’t an argument, it was a clarification of the issue; a couple posters said they didn’t understand why for many there was a conflict between enjoying music and striving for maximized fidelity, so I provided the clarification as best I could.  
For two, again, you can look on this very site and find several people dismissing outright God knows how much great music because “the sound is bad.”  
Perhaps you and others spent x-amount of time (months? years? decades?) maximizing your system’s fidelity, and at no point did you find yourself analyzing the fidelity instead of just enjoying the music (which is sort of impossible - a non-audiophile just listens to music…an audiophile, by nature, must divorce themselves from sheer enjoyment of the music itself to meticulously and diligently analyze the sound), then, well, hats off to you.  
Any way you slice it, there is no “straw man” here. 

 

Write “audiophilia nervosa” (or ‘audio nervosa’ or ‘audiophile nervosa’) into a Google search engine and then press, “search.”

I don’t know how one can’t see the clear difference between these two things:  
a) person listens to music they like
b) person presses “play” and then immediately goes into “analysis mode,” scrutinizing the fidelity of the audio.

I don’t know how a person could actually undertake the process of maximizing the level of satisfaction their home audio provides without being person b).

This doesn’t have to be something to be ashamed of or get defensive about.  
It’s a part of the process of being an audiophile.  
Nevertheless, such a process may indeed conflict with being a person who just enjoys their favorite music, every day, devoid of such cognitive preoccupations.
 

@engineears Well said.

I think a pitfall of being so attentive to the fidelity of the playback is some folks cut out of their life significant swaths of music because the recordings don’t sound like whatever some audiophile magazine told them in an article constitutes “good sound.”  
I see the act of seeking the best mastering of a particular recording as totally logical and reasonable.  
I see the act of denying oneself the experience of listening to great music (not audiophilic media’s espousal of ‘great recordings,’ but great music) as sad.