Agree with Bdgregory, NEVER, and the destination does not matter, just the journey...as a matter of fact, this hobby is a mirror of life itself: you always have enough because you always have more than the average human on earth but you never have enough because there is always something better or at least different out there...you can be content early and diversify your interest or you can always be chasing the Graal yet never invalidate the precedent choice, you can be happy never being fully satisfied or you can be unhappy to reach a state of satisfaction and then move on, you can change system when you are unhappy or you can work on improving your system when you feel it is becoming boring....but the ultimate system does not really exist and if it did, it would be very very sad and depressing. AMEN.
When is your system good enough-and why?
Frank van Alstine once suggested that this should be measured by how much time you actually spent listening to your system (not Frank's exact words, but my summary). When the sense of pleasure of the "rightness of the sound" is added, I agree it is an excellent yardstick. I have traded many systems that gave me great pleasure for more capable ones that did not. My listening time invariably plummeted.
Many have replaced tube based systems that were wonderful at low volume but failed at so called "realistic" volumes or with demanding material, with solid state replacements did the demanding material, but never delivered the pleasure of it's predecessor. I wandered about for years before discovering some of the particular characteristics that made all the difference to me (tubes, surprisingly were not among them). Rather than recite my list (and perhaps have to defend it), I would like to take the coward's way out and ask others what they have discovered matters to them sufficiently to make their system "good enough".
Many have replaced tube based systems that were wonderful at low volume but failed at so called "realistic" volumes or with demanding material, with solid state replacements did the demanding material, but never delivered the pleasure of it's predecessor. I wandered about for years before discovering some of the particular characteristics that made all the difference to me (tubes, surprisingly were not among them). Rather than recite my list (and perhaps have to defend it), I would like to take the coward's way out and ask others what they have discovered matters to them sufficiently to make their system "good enough".