OP, clearly this is an interactive hobby.
Here's a quote from a really well-researched article on the audiophile hobby in Japan:
"This research study started with a question: What is “good” sound in the high- end audio? The notion of “high-fidelity,” which can be defined as the accurate reproduction of the original recorded music performance, was encountered many times during the field interviews and in the documents. In effect, the term was an implicit “agreement” or a shared understanding among the stakeholders, including manufacturing engineers, dealers and sales representatives, professional retail shops, professional audio reviewers, magazine editors, peak associations, and amateur audiophiles. It is the ultimate goal and the key point of reference in the community practice. In reality, however, the definition had to be vague with margins of ambiguity due to the fact that the high-end audio equipment experience is a complex interaction of art, culture, and technology – an agent for humans.
The equipment delivers recorded music to human ears and minds with different tones, focal qualities, and sound characteristics in order to t the subjective orientations, styles, and needs of audiophiles, as a tangible transducer of musical acoustic vibrations. At the same time, audio equipment, as a combination of machines, is also the object of attachments for audiophiles.
As a result, it is obvious that this complexity and ambiguity require multidimensional approaches in the valuation process, making use of both quantitative metric measurements and subjective, qualitative judgements by audiophiles as valuation devices. The latter requires the seasoned listening experience gained from years of tasting high-quality sound and ongoing tweaking, tinkering,, and repeated recombinations and reconfigurations of the components of the audio system. Employing the cable work, making system setting adjustments, install- ing peripherals – it is all part of a lifelong search process for audiophiles, a never ending quest for hi- tones. The individual experiences and sensations at the moment of the tasting are the processual activities that deepen attachments and create hardcore audiophiles."
-- "Japan’s high-end audio equipment industry in transition: Pragmatic valuation of “hi- ” sound and valorization through networks" by Tsutomu Nakano https://tinyurl.com/y36lknuj
