@newton_john asked an important question which, IMHO, no one has really even addressed here. It's the perennial question facing the audiophile: is one in it for the music, or for the thrill of the reproduction? For the music, or for the kit? newton_john says that he can "get into and enjoy certain recordings" even "before making the change" (of equipment) and that, even if the change "provided...some audible improvement in sound quality," nevertheless, he "can't get into the recordings more than that"—that is, more than he did prior to the change.
Now, I hope this isn't quite true. Isn't the whole point of "improving sound quality" for the sake of "getting into the music more"? But I nevertheless see his point, as I suppose we all do. There are certain pieces of music I've loved all my adult life. I first heard them on equipment vastly inferior in sound quality to what I have now. But can I say that I can now "get into" those favorite pieces better, more fully, than I ever have? Certainly not! Getting really involved in the music is a complicated thing; it involves far more than the equipment and the room acoustics. Most importantly, it involves one's own mind at the moment. But it also depends on how important music is for you in that particular time of your life, who you may be sharing it with, how much you already know about the music that what you're listening to developed from, how susceptible to musical enjoyment you are at the moment, how young your ears are (face it: we old guys have lost a lot more in hearing than our audio systems can compensate for!), and many other factors.
So, get over it: we chase "the absolute sound" NOT for the sake of the music, but for the sake of the thrill of the sound itself: for the thrill of being able to convincingly reproduce a symphony orchestra (for example) in our own living rooms. That's fine. It's a lot like the thrill of owning a performance vehicle whose capabilities one will never really test, being too old, or not a trained driver. Again, that's OK.
Upgradeitis is a matter of loving the equipment for the sound it can produce. Music is the main source of entertaining or engaging sound, so we mostly listen to music on that equipment. But love of music is not what audiophilia is about. I know a lot of audiophiles and a lot of musicians. There is a very small overlap between these populations.
BTW, congrats to @mahgister for finally using ChatGPT, or whatever program he must have used, to clean up the prose in (most of) his first post here.