Who's winning?

Doesn't matter how much the setup cost, the one who is winning is the person who is using it!!! Have a friend who is big into audio (I got some of his hand me downs) he almost never uses his system, and is constantly upgrading it. My main system gets used more in one day, over his for a couple months. It's sad.

In my house, the HT room has 9.4.2 Atmos, sounds fantastic! All modern components, perfect speaker placement, all DSQ'ed up. Movies are at times better over the theater. Music is just ok.

The bedroom has a $700 Polk soundbar, use it almost every day for music when getting ready, it's sounds ok

The main 2ch system is all vintage and analog (sans streamer) and it gets used for at lest 6 hours a day, sometimes much longer. It sounds fantastic! I stare at it in amazement, it transports me places and times. I get lost in it.

All of my systems in my entire house, cost less then my friends new bookshelf speakers he just got a couple months ago, but hasn't used yet, his new integrated has been delayed. 

I'd say, I'm WINNING!

I think the winner is the guy who buys the 30k speaker used for 15k.

This. I wouldn’t have the system I have without the guys that buy the stuff new and get tired of it after 6 months!

I would suggest, unfortunately, that the $30K speaker guy is probably more representative of humanity: 100K years ago, two tribes lived on opposite sides of a mountain. Both had equal access to water, fruits, and game. Due to genetics, one tribe had a tendency to be less satisfied with what they had than the other. Which one survived? Unfortunately it was the less satisfied tribe because their dissatisfaction caused them to invade and kill the other tribe before they realized the grass looked greener but it wasn’t. Then they invaded the next tribe over as well.

Unfortunately we’ve evolved from the tribe programmed to be unhappy and jealous.  The happy tribes didn't make it. 

Winning or losing is NOT = satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

Satisfaction is better than dissatisfaction regardless of cost.

One can enjoy more than one pair of speakers of non-identical costs.

Audiophile vs non-audiophile have different priorities which leads into differences in spending on audio components- seems pointless and illogical to try to link cost with satisfaction