I have had only brief episodes when I experienced much angst due to the hobby. The most severe one was at the beginning of my audiophile journey when within a few years I had four CD players wander through my system(s). After having settled on a Wadia 8/12 combo and my current amps and speakers I have been happy with my system and experienced much joy with it for almost 20 years and have had added only some modifications to my amps and speakers, and midway incorporated a REL subwoofer that I still own. The last two years have been busy again with upgrades, but most of it has been additions (room treatment, external power supplies for amps) and only one substitute upgrade, the DAC (I don't count the switch from my old Wadia 8 transport as an upgrade, since on the Berkeley DAC the new unit sounds the same and was only necessary because the 20 year old Wadia 8 had started to have problems, with no spare parts being available anymore). Here every upgrade has been a definite winner.
I have avoided a lot of angst by deliberately missing out on the format wars, in hindsight now an even more fortunate decision than it seemed to me at the time when SACD was *the* hi-res thing. Not only did SACD turn out to be the flop that I predicted it would be, now it is superseded by 24/176 and 24/192, so why should I even have bothered. And while there are people who still hold that the hi-res formats are ssooo superior to CD, many audiophiles think differently. They assert that while it is true that they are of higher quality than CD, the differences are not huge, especially now that CD playback has made so much dramatic progress in recent years, and that quality of recording and mastering itself make a much bigger difference (witness many posts on this forum and comments elsewhere *)). Indeed, I get a stunning resolution from CD out of my Berkeley DAC that I would never have thought possible from the medium in my wildest dreams, and apparently the Berkeley DACs, as fantastic as it is in its own right, doesn't even reach the ceiling with CD. I just don't see any compelling reason to jump on hi-res since CD, where all the music is, has become so good, and comparatively very little music is available in hi-res, something that will never change. People who think otherwise are deluding themselves, just like they did about SACD. Sure, Sony has recently said they would open their vaults to all their hi-res but I believe it when I see it. Certainly, many CDs sound crappy, but this is not a problem of the CD medium itself but a result of the loudness wars, among others, and unlike others I am not much affected by this since most of my consumption is classical and classical avantgarde, where recordings on average actually have become better over the years -- most of my CDs sound very good and a good majority even sounds great.
Overall, since I am under no illusion that a stereo system will ever come close to live music, and I simply can enjoy all the exciting things that my system can provide instead (some recent inner unrest has died down once more), the audiophile hobby has brought me immeasurably much more joy over the years than teeth gnashing, angst, desire and jealousy.
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*) also confirming what I have heard before, that often the difference in quality between CD and SACD simply comes down to better mastering of the latter and has little to do with the formats themselves
