Does it have to sound good for you to like it?

Oh, so "audiophile" is about gear then. Well, this is exactly what Alan said.  He has tons of real gear in properly treated rooms at his workplaces :-) For some reason I don't think they elevate cables off the floor.

@mikhailark No, the point is Parsons isn’t necessarily in touch at all with what drives audiophiles, and from the video showing both his home setup and words that would certainly seem to be the case.  And you have no idea what equipment he has at his workplaces or how the rooms are treated, so that’s just pure conjecture based on nothing but your imagination.  The only thing we know is that setup/room in his house which is crap that no audiophile in his/her right mind would have or endure. 

Right. Sometimes I do listen to mostly for the sound but rarely, though the music still has to be good. If I don't like it I won't listen at all.

mikhailark, if the band, Pink Floyd in this case, decides then why did they settle for less? They had enough resources to make that recording much better. Analog recording technology was fully developed by 1975.

Hello rvpiano!  If a recording of a good performance or a well liked song is flawed, I'll keep it for the value of the music. But even the finest recording of an unwanted song isn't worth keeping, even in these days of streaming which I am just getting used to.  Why bother win something you don't want to hear?

If you have a piece of equipment that is the only thing you have that will play certsin media, it may be worth keeping, even if it's performance is second rate.

It's interesting how varied our preferences for music can be. The experience of music is deeply personal and subjective, influenced by many factors including the melody, lyrics, and the emotional connection we have with a song.

For some, the quality of the voice and the production value are paramount, while for others, the emotional or thematic content of the music can outweigh technical considerations. My son's great tolerance for low-resolution, unconventional music highlights how diverse and individualized musical tastes can be. Platforms like Spotify cater to this diversity by offering a vast range of music that appeals to different tastes and preferences.

Ultimately, whether one values high sound quality or meaningful content, music remains a powerful form of expression that resonates differently with each listener. It's this variety in taste that makes music such a rich and universal art form.

If it is bad enough I cannot listen for very long.

However, last night, in the course of auditioning/breaking in a pair of new speakers I started with Witches Bew (the Living Stereo 24 bit disc, NOT the SACD) and it sounded pretty good to me (and I am not a really a fan of classical, which may say something about the speakers). While that disc was playing, the desire to hear Lou Reed sing Sweet Jane came over me (". . . those were different times . . .") so I put on Rock And Roll Animal. The quality of that is on the rough side, but for the reasons @mrdecibel frequently cites, I got into it. However, with that last sentence typed, I probably wouldn’t want to listen to too many hours in a row with that quality.

I used to listen to poorer quality recordings when my gear was in the living room and I would be doing other things while jamming out and not paying as much attention to detail. After I moved to a smaller dedicated room there are no distractions but that has a price. For me, anyway, it does.