Mid-Fi, Hi-Fi or.....?

@johnnotkathi ....If you're enjoying what you're listening to through and with whatever is making it possible....

You've no reason to make an excuse about it, nor any reason to feel guilty or lessened by the means employed....really....

There's a simple cure at hand:

TURN IT UP.

;)  Regards, and yours unruly....

Try this one....

You are a Audiophile but on the older lower end of the $$ range , Audiophiles are 

always buying something , or at least looking.

OP,

It's the never ending journey isn't it, the question is where does someone decide to get off of the merry go round and be happy? I'm not near there yet.

I love my current set up as it is very enjoyable and musical, but I know that there is so much better sound out there. With my new Clayton Shaw Caladan speakers (coming in February?), I'm at about $19,000 and I still consider my system the lower end of mid fi. I'm buying a new tube preamp in the next few weeks, a new streamer late spring, and I've got more than a dozen DIY cables to make over the next few months. After that I'll enjoy it for a while, let the cable configuration settle out and regroup.....but I'm in a very itchy upgrade swirl right now.

I took a friend to CES/The SHOW about 20 years ago. He told me I was crazy spending $50k or more on an audio system. He thought it couldn’t get much better than his $2000 system and he thought he couldn’t hear that well. 
After the 1st room, he had to pick up his jaw off the floor. Now he understood why people spend $$$ for a system. I spent almost $10k on my 2nd audio system in the late 70’s. It sounded very nice for its day, but technology has changed (as well as the increase in prices) but todays systems for the same price you paid 50 years ago sounds much better today.

I have multiple $2000-$5000 systems in my house, which would very nice, especially for background music. But compared to my reference system that cost more than 10x, the sq is much much better in my reference system, we are not talking about a couple % differences, we are talking night and day difference.

BTW: if I take 1 of my $2000 integrated amp and modified it to the hilt, it will never ever get close to my reference preamp/amp that cost 15x more. The modified $2000 amp will still have the same character sound when it was stock.