Wasted Years.

Any piece of music will be enjoyed more if the recording is well done and if your system/room can translate this acoustic information for your ears...

Once this common place fact is said, two of the greatest pianists i know are badly recorded... I enjoy them way more than most well recorded pianists...

Music is not sound...

Meaning is not information ...

I hope to learn more about acoustics, but until then I agree with you that merely throwing money at an audio system is counterproductive and gauche.

I will add some fact to illustrate the power of acoustics.

In a system/room under  acoustic control you can hear a single straw or a small tube  used as a resonator his audible effect on some frequencies range  will contribute by his dimensions and location to the sound experience  as much as a cable or in some case as a dac upgrade, if there is many resonators well placed or not  ... 

People are not conscious of that... They are only conscious of a change if it concern a piece of gear not about the material specific content of the room , be it a type of materials (wood, glass, fabric, etc) or some resonators, or reflexive surface, diffusive one absorbing one etc ...

That is my point about acoustics power...

 The next step after room control is stereo crosstalk limitations which are adressed by Dr. Choueiri  filters ...

 All this is way more important than most upgrade ...

Reminds me of the famous quote in the field of biology by Albert Szent-Györgyi:

“In my quest for the secret of life I started my research in histology. Unsatisfied by the information that cellular morphology could give me about life, I turned to physiology. Finding physiology too complex, I took up pharmacology. Still finding the situation too complicated, I turned to bacteriology. But bacteria were even too complex, so I descended to the molecular level, studying chemistry and physical chemistry. After twenty years' work, I was led to conclude that to understand life we have to descend to the electronic level and to the world of wave mechanics. But electrons are just electrons and have no life at all. Evidently on the way I lost life; it had run out between my fingers.”

Happy listening!

I wasted years of enjoyment by not experimenting with acoustic treatments.

I think you can have your cake and eat it too...Enjoy the music and be thankful you've had the resources to bring it faithfully to your ears.