Do you listen to equipment or music.

I found the best way to return to listening to the music (as opposed to analysing equipment it was being played upon) was by playing those songs I love the best. The songs with the greatest emotional significance to me.

For example, classics like James Taylor's Fire and Rain, Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust, Nick Drake's Magic, or Joni Mitchell's Answer Me, My Love etc are so enjoyable and compelling that sound quality concerns more or less disappear. These tracks sound great through anything, even a flat screen TV. 

The only time I get a little frustrated with sound quality nowadays is when I'm driving. The system in the car has always sounded a little washed out and lacking dynamics, and the CD player is broke.

So I'm stuck with FM radio with it's crass presenters and endless traffic of bad news interruptions - non stop Brexit waffle. Classic FM is my current favourite because there's more music and less news and talk. It makes many others here in the UK seem Ill mannered.

Even better, once in a while they will play a piece of music so compelling as to forget the poor sound quality in the car - it can happen! I guess if a piece of music really moves you, it can break the audiophile habit of constantly analysing and remind you again why you got into this pastime in the first place.

Music, but if there's something glaringly wrong with your equipment, you'll be unable to enjoy the music. For instance, if your system is fatiguing, as often happens with solid state amps or mediocre DACs, you'll find yourself either not listening often, or swapping components in and out until you find a configuration you can live with.

johnspain, what you're doing, listening to the same track over and over, while ubiquitous and I'm sure will be staunchly defended is nevertheless one of the worst habits you can get into. I know I'm in the minority, but who cares when you got Mikey Fremer in your corner? Yeah. Michael Fremer. 

Not that I don't ever play the same thing twice. Playing one cut last night it hit me that its been a while since I demagnetized and so I stopped, demagnetized, and started over. Huge improvement, of course. But I didn't do it for that specific reason. To compare. I did it because I want to hear the whole song beginning to end. I never, ever in my life would subject myself to the torture- the ineffective, short-sighted, stifling, sucking the life out of the experience monotony of playing the same track over and over and over again. Pretty sure I dropped 10 IQ points and forgot two sound critique terms just thinking about it.

Where was I? (See what I mean?) Oh yeah: audiophilia nervosa. This is the term you all are looking for and its a real thing. Building a long term musically satisfying system calls for mastery of some pretty technical listening skills. Then on top of that there's a whole lot of applied physics and acoustics. Then as if that wasn't complicated enough there's all these shysters clamoring to convince you their morphic field polished rocks yada yada blah blah blah. When at the end of the day what we really want, supposedly our reason for doing all this, is to get the toe tapping. Real easy to lose track of that. To find yourself so caught up in dissecting technical details you lose the ability to just sit and relax and let the music move you. Of all the pitfalls, and there are a lot of them, this may be the worst. 

That being the case, surely whatever you can do to lessen the likelihood of this awful outcome you should do. One of them is to stop playing the same old same old over and over again. Play music you love. Play it because you love it. Because you want to enjoy hearing it. Never play it just to prove a point.

That's what I do. The way I figure it, its nice to know the rose is made of molecules, but zooming in to that level ain't never gonna tell you zip about how beautiful it is. Step back. Relax. Take it all in.

Don't waste any more time than you have to listening to equipment. Listen to music. The more what you hear feels like music, the better the equipment. Period.

My equipment allows me to listen to more than the music. I’m listening to the microphones used, the room, the mix, the eq, the cutting of the disk, the pressing. When it all comes together it’s audio nirvana. I’m at the point where I’d rather hear a superb recording of a bad polka band than a horrible recording of the Beatles.