Who's winning?

Some people are completely happy listening to music on their iphone, go figure.

@mapman

whatever floats your boat…

I agree with you…..Water is the cheapest option!

@wturkey

who wins?

The salesman definitely…. He knows how long is a long bit of string…. And how to exploit someone to get to the end (big maybe)

The term "intelligent ignorance" comes to mind.  Sometimes "not knowing" is "smarter" than "knowing." We got a gift of a bottle of wine that was 5x what our typical wine costs.  Big mistake.  No, we're not spending 5x for wine these days.  We only upped the ante by 2x because our appreciation of good wine clicked up a notch.  But that's still 2x to get us to a "wine worth drinking" these days when we were totally satisfied with our "standard" wine of the day(s).

Same with audio.  Sports cars.  Bikes.  Etc.

The song "Comfortably Numb" may have a literal interpretation here?

Socrates is not satisfied or unsatisfied. Socrates is not a passive consumer of cheap speakers or highly costlier one. Socrates think, experiment and learn acoustics with anything cheap or costly and end always appreciating what he did.

A question not well posed will gave useless answers.

«No one enter here who did not know acoustics» Plato pupil of Socrates reading Audiogon thread.

Is ignorance really bliss? I believe I would be happier not knowing a bunch of stuff I do, but I wouldn't trade the knowledge for that happiness.