No conspicuous omission on my part, but I probably didn't express myself clearly enough.
Let’s imagine three people:
One connects to technical performance in their system — they have a connection to sound. I’m emphatically NOT claiming that "listening to music" is somehow superior to listening to sound. Why would anyone judge what someone does for pleasure? If someone gets deep satisfaction from the technical challenge of optimizing a system sonically — that’s entirely legitimate. I have no interest in policing motivations.
The second person loves music and wants a good system to deliver it. They want to forget about the means (technology) and just enjoy the end (music) as soon as they can. Again, no judgment. People love what they love, and if they prefer to separate means from ends, that’s their preference.
The third person has no connection to music or sound; they’re not engaged in a listening activity at all. They’re doing something else: collecting, status-signaling, engineering appreciation. I don’t judge this either, but they’ve exited the category of audiophile listening.
Your objection uses the third person — someone who isn’t listening at all — as evidence that "listening to sound" and "listening to music" are opposed activities. But this conflates two distinct types: the first person (an audiophile focused on sound) with the third person (not an audiophile at all). Those are different categories.
My point is subtler. When I’m actually listening, the supposed opposition between attending to acoustic properties and attending to music is false. I cannot attend carefully to musical meaning without attending — maybe not focally, but to some degree — to the acoustic phenomena that constitute it.
When I listen, sometimes the music is the focus and sometimes it’s the sound, but both are always there. The ability to control what is focal is an achievement of listening practice. The inability to control that is a kind of dysfunction that I often see audiophiles complain about.
