Hiatus

Listening for sound became a moot point. Even when I achieved the sound I wanted, I thought like the song goes: “Is that all there is?”  In other words it’s a dead end.  
The enjoyment I get from music is infinite! 
 With streaming I have just about the whole catalog of Western classical music at my disposal in almost every possible version.

@raysmtb1

In general, I agree with the clothing analogy, but I think a food recipe might be more accurate, in that it allows for more precise tweaking.

With clothes you are stuck with the subject person’s size, shape and appearance and face it, some of us aren’t exactly runway candidates.

With a recipe there are more components and therefore more options that will affect the final satisfaction level. Take the soup I made last night. Basic ingredients are sausage, beans, some spices, potatoes, vegetables and chicken stock.

Change from breakfast sausage to a Tuscan pork sausage, add some cayenne and cumin and use my homemade brown chicken stock and it is heavenly.

As to the hiatus. It’s something I have never done, so I can’t comment. What I will say is that the quality of my system, while plebeian to some of our $150K members, is still at a level where I rarely analyze and listen at the same time.

Good for you, it's never too late! I never enjoy my audio system more than when I'm just listening to the music, which is what I'm doing most often now. The music elevates me, the audio system not so much. :-)

rvpiano: I've appreciated many of your posts over the years, but none as much as this one. By coincidence, I, too, have finally arrived at some kind of audiophilc stasis. After half a dozen superlative speaker systems in competition with my beloved Teslas, I finally acquired a pair of Magneplanar 1.6 QRs—a speaker technology I've been fascinated by for thirty years. And still, my Teslas prevailed. Now, it's back to the music, without any distractions regarding equipment: futile concerns that I might enjoy this more with X or Y. Such a liberation to stop thinking about the reproduction technology, and return to a full immersion in the thing reproduced: the music! I may now finally stop lurking on this site....