the process must be enjoyed
This is much more important than one might think. Many well-meaning audiophiles shoot themselves in the foot by obsessively playing the same snippets at the same volume over and over again. Then to make things even worse they use one track to evaluate this, one to evaluate that. You all know its true, they are on here every day. This approach virtually guarantees utter boredom and leads to the same problem one of its practitioners already noted of being able to listen for only one thing at a time.
This is not normal. This is borderline neurotic.
Every time I have people over, and I have a bunch of them coming this weekend, I always make sure and ask what kind of music do they enjoy and let them know its all about them. Because I am really, really into listening and nobody but nobody ever gonna be listening to crap that turns them off. Music they love, that gets them going, whatever it is, that they will focus on like a laser beam.
Think about that and consider just how screwed up so many audiophiles are. Its almost like they search out the most unlistenable music and play it over and over again not because they like it but because has some little artifact of a sound they think is somehow essential to evaluating the perfect whatever.
I was lucky and broke out of this mold early on. Took my little stack of CDs with me, started listening to a McCormack DNA1, knew I found my amp when I noticed my list of audio tics was the last thing on my mind, I was just enjoying the music.