Technical sophistication

I’m a retired quantitative biologist.

I agree with @millercarbon that you need to trust your own ears. A few tips from my perspective:

• Audiophiles have many "secret" techniques for improving sound. A few of them actually work. Most work their effects only on certain listeners. Is that too subtle? They are placebos, is what I meant.
  
• Speakers and room acoustics account for the greater part of what you hear; equipment is next important; the cable game is for when everything else is really good already.
• A tipped-up treble range will sound more immediate and impressive initially, and a year later, you’ll wonder why so many of your recordings are unpleasant to listen to.
• At least in advertising and PR (which means also in the first pages of reviews), there is a lot of technobabble. Very little of it has to do with the reason the product sounds good or bad; it’s largely marketing fluff.
  
• Anyone who says there is ONE best technology, or ONE best DAC chip, or ONE way to do anything in audio is a know-nothing blowhard.
• Despite that, most audiophiles are great people when you meet them in person. Join the local audio club if there is one!

Have fun!

Thanks for the detailed reply! I have Harley's book and I've consulted it occasionally. Perhaps a more disciplined and conscientious course of study is in order.

Two parts of the book were for me the most valuable were the section on listening skills and terminology and the chapter on the turntable. The advice on why the turntable is the centerpiece of any proper high end music system was for me a revelation. This was years ago back when the CD was supposed to be perfect sound forever. Its been so long and things have changed so much maybe people don't know but that's not made-up derision that was actually the CD marketing message: perfect sound forever. For a respected senior Stereophile reviewer to be saying not CD, LP, was - well it had to be taken seriously. And it was.

But it was the info on listening skills that really hit me. Does not take long reading comments to realize the extent of most guys listening skills ranges from "sounds good" all the way to "sounds better" which if that sounds like close to zero, yeah, then I write pretty clear after all. Compare that with some of the better reviewers like Harley or Fremer, guys who go to lengths describing tiny details of bits of aspects of sound to try and get across what they're hearing. Might seem like flowery prose. Sometimes might even be flowery prose. But it can also be the key that opens the door to your learning to recognize and appreciate aspects of sound you never imagined were even there.

Its a challenge because on the one hand you have the totally valid technical approach of something like say if the first reflection arrives within a window of three to six milliseconds the brain interprets it as being from the same source and so this interferes with our ability to localize the source. While on the other hand you have the totally valid listeners approach of the imaging is more solid with the speakers out from the walls. No right or wrong but its hard to argue you can really understand what is going on without understanding at least a fair amount about both approaches.

They're mostly wannabe engineers here, like that guy who runs this site:
http://www.machinadynamica.com/

millercarbon......I am curious. Your skills must go beyond those stated in your first post. Although now retired, I was a Radiologic Technologist for 25 years (medical) and then went into industrial radiography for another 20 simply because medical didn't pay as well. Beside knowing the X-ray circuit for the understanding of how the machines produce X-rays that type of question can, and is usually, asked on the National Registry exam.
Being familiar with a lot of stationary, portable equipment, and the use of isotopes I could never come close to building an X-ray tube from scratch. Just curious where your additional knowledge comes from?