Why does my laptop annoy me less than my rig?

I listen to a lot of music from the two itty bitty speakers in my PowerBook G4. And it gives me a lot of pleasure, even though it's distorted, there's no bass, and I'm missing most of the detail. Same goes for my clock radio. I like to wake up to rap. For some reason, it's amusing to greet the day with rhymed obscenities distorted and enclosed in a little piece of plastic. I also wake up to classical, and sometimes spend half an hour listening to a concerto through the clock radio before taking a shower.

Other times, of course, I listen to my main system. It's not a great system. It's called "midfi purgatory" for a reason: purgatory isn't forever, and I'm determined to buy and tweak my way into paradise. But it's still cost me a fair chunk of cash. Retail value is, um, let's see... close to $5K with stands and cables included. My clock radio was $10. So I could have bought 500 clock radios for the price of my system. (Thank God -- or Ebay -- I didn't pay retail!) And my system isn't bad for the money in any particular dimension of evaluation. It's very dynamic, bass is crisp, and pianos, as well as narrators, sound real. Certainly in any way of comparing audio system, my rig whips my clock radio (and laptop) by a ridiculous margin.

And yet... My clock radio never annoys me. Neither does my laptop. My system annoys the hell out of me! Strings can be thin and metallic, complex passages get muddled, cabinets resonate at certain frequencies if the volume is up, most music is fatiguing when played at realistic levels, and so on. I'm trying different things, of course, room treatment, swapping components, and so on. And the annoyance gets a little better, but it's still there.

I have a theory. The theory is that the clock radio is so far from realism, we just don't expect it. So there's no annoyance factor in its falling short of realism. But my system is just close enough that we really notice what's missing... that gap between our simulated acoustic instruments and those very instruments, live. Hence, the annoyance.

Analogy: HDTV on a big plasma or LCD is really cool. But I notice moving edges, and they really annoy me. In fact, in all such systems, I always notice something that isn't quite right and annoys me. The picture is much closer to just looking with the naked eye than a standard TV set is. And yet, standard TV sets don't annoy me for their lack of realism. I take them for what they are. Automatically.

I'm not about to give up on getting out of purgatory. But I wonder if my annoyance is an inevitable result of getting closer, but not quite arriving, at auditory realism. Any thoughts?