How does sound influence your appreciation?

@immatthewj

+1

Yep …. me too. For like reasons, I generally choose my live concert event attendance influenced on the venue acoustics . To fully appreciate live performances by somebody like Diana Krall, Chris Botti, Celtic Woman dictates a stepped up good acoustics venue .

Sure…I splurged on rare occasion for first section floor seats in a 22000 seat arena for mega star rock groups (Eagles, Fleetwood Mac ).. Crap acoustics be damned . I can only imagine how stellar the latter could sound in a smaller “proper” venue .

@rvpiano I don’t think your system is homogenizing everything. So it’s just a phase you are going thru since you have good synergy between components, room and your ears. Enjoy it. You’re going to get your discernment back. Nothing to worry about. 
 

My system is now at the point it is very revealing of the recording so I gravitate towards the best recordings when listening to Classical. With Qobuz I can survey many recordings of the same work until I find the best recorded version. Unless it is really a weird interpretation I am not as critical of the performance . If it doesn’t sound good I can’t listen to it. 

When my systems were less resolving and/or had specific issues I needed to tightly control my choices of which recordings to listen to. With ever increasing resolving capabilities I find myself most enjoying letting Roon auto play from my huge library of streams and rips. Having to consciously curate my listening session is a now a huge imposition or distraction from the sheer enjoyment of listening. Funny how I can now appreciate even the tunes I don't especially care for!

This is complex for me and depends upon my mood.  Let me start with stating that there are some excellent performances of iconic music that are so poorly engineered in both analog and digital, where early digital engineering exacerbated the sound quality issues, that I can not listen past the issues into the performance.  So with recordings in this group I can affirm sound quality impacts my ability to enjoy the performance and musical composition.  From that point it depends on my mood my objective for my listening session.  At times, I want a critical listening session, not only to enjoy the performance and composition, but also to revel in the engineering quality of the recording and my system.  My focus is on reproduction of timbre, dynamics, staging, and imaging.  So, in these instances I also can affirm sound quality matters.  Most often, greater than 90% of the time,  I am just trying to relax, using music as the tranquilizer.  In there sessions I find myself  engulfed in the performance and composition, reveling in the conductor’s interpretation, musicianship, interplay between the musicians, and swings in mood and energy that a composition leads you through.  I am lucky that have my system established to a point that permits me to travel this path into the musical performance as well as taking the aforementioned critical listen path depending on my mood. During these sessions into the performance for relaxation, sound quality matters not.  Maybe, for me,  it’s a form of audiophile/music lover dissociative identity disorder.