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

We take turns meeting at each member’s home, allowing each member to host and present/share their music, food, wine/drinks and good company. Most of the members have various consumer-level listening stations: AV receivers, Bluetooth soundbars and even the TV!

@audiodidact  , this KIND OF (remember, I did type "kind of") reminds me of when I was in the Air Force in the late '70s through early '80s.  Most of us had rack systems and some had better systems than that, and when I lived in the barracks (which I assume was a lot like a college dorm) a bunch of us would get together in someone's room and we'd play LPs and 8 tracks and drink beer.  Then in the early '80s my rack system and I moved off base to an apartment with a couple of other guys and people would come over and we'd drink beer and use cannabis products and whatever else might be around at the time and play LPs and 8 tracks or one of the local FM rock stations and turn on the TV with the sound down.  A friend of mine had what we considered at the time a pretty good system--Bose 901s and some huge Japanese watts in front of them. He had a great LP collection, and I remember an outdoor keg party he had at the little house where he was living and I got to play DJ and it was a great party and I had a blast picking the tunes and spinning the LPs..

In retrospect, I am positive the sound was not very good back then, but I also remember having a lot of pure fun with the MUSIC.  Way more pure fun than I have now with far superior gear and SQ.  But that was a long time ago, long before I had ever heard of critical listening, and if I wasn't listening the way I am listening now-a-days, I probably wouldn't be listening to anything, except maybe the radio in my pickup when I was driving some place.

Huh?

@soix, ha, ha.  I have to chuckle a bit because I’ve been guilty of nudging a couple of the guys to upgrade, if just a little.  One of the guys actually went from Bose cubes to KLH 5’s!  The only snag (to me), was he kept an AV receiver in the chain.  But this guy knows more about music than I can ever hope to know, and with those speakers he’s in heaven, though he won’t take that next plunge just yet, (I’m lurking patiently).  The other guys remain immune to my charms. So far.

"We take turns meeting at each member’s home, allowing each member to host and present/share their music, food, wine/drinks and good company. Most of the members have various consumer-level listening stations: AV receivers, Bluetooth soundbars and even the TV!"

One of the most memorable music evenings I ever had was when I was in college and frequented the local record shop.  They didn't have much of a jazz selection but what they had was well curated by an older guy who worked in the shop.  It got to where he's set things aside for me.  One day he asked if I wanted to come over to his house and listen to 78s.  I happily accepted, and we spent a terrific evening in his "listening room"--a spare bedroom filled with shelves of 78 albums and singles, and a little KLH bookshelf system with the speakers plopped randomly on stacks of LPs.  The music was wonderful. ;-)

@frogman 

However, FOR ME, the idea that the pursuit of great (subjective) sound quality as the end-all is worthy of anywhere near the level of concern or attention as does the appreciation of the vast artistic riches found in a great performance of great music strikes me as odd. FOR ME and others audio is a hobby while music is much more than that.

You are a musician, no?  I've often wondered whether those of us who play music aren't inherently more inclined to focus on upon music more than sonics.