cleeds,
'Wow, you sound really unhappy. You might consider pursuing another hobby altogether.'
Yes, me and the OP both! This kind of disillusionment almost inevitably awaits every unsuspecting audiophile caught up in the upgrade path.
However, just like the OP, my passion for music has not dimmed. In fact it is as strong as ever. I now can enjoy music on a variety of systems : my phone/ headphones/Bluetooth speaker, my PC, or on my separates system.
The issue here is the way some of us feel we were mislead.
As the OP said,
'I was listening to about $60 of hi-fi equipment that sounded extraordinarily nice and made me wonder why I'd spent a hundred and fifty times that much "improving" my main system over the years.'
That is the question here, isn't it?
You see when many of us started our journey towards seeking our version audio nirvana we had very little idea of what path to follow, with no map/guide and very little idea of what the end destination might be.
In the absence of both knowledge and experience (two essential pre-requisites before embarking) many of us tended to accept what we had read. After all, these were experienced learned men of the hi-fi world speaking. Weren't they?
There lies the problem.
Today, thanks to the internet, anyone new to this hobby can look around and share others experiences and be far better prepared for their journey than their predecessors ever were.
More skeptical and less gullible, I hope.
As they say, it's always better to think for yourself. Ultimately it's far more rewarding despite the extra effort.
mulveling,
Good for you brother, knowing of that particular all too common 'audiophile demo fodder' trap.
It took me ages and ages to realise why they hated playing mainstream recordings at demos or shows.
In fact at one demo I was even told, "If you're going to listen to that 60s stuff, you may as well stay with the system you've got."
At the time that didn't compute, but I now realise that those words were not very far off the mark.
I still love audio, I still love music, and though I wish my journey had been easier, I still dream of that audio nirvana.
Just not so vividly now.