What you're describing has a name in the sound-studies literature: Pierre Schaeffer called it "reduced listening" (écoute réduite) — attending to a sound as sound, stripped of its source and its reference, just the acoustic object itself. Schaeffer built his whole musique concrète project around teaching himself and his students to do this deliberately, because ordinary listening is saturated with causal and semantic attention — we hear a door slam, not a transient. His discipline was to bracket the door.
The catch, which Schaeffer knew, is that reduced listening is a tool, not a home. He used it to compose — to find musical relationships between recorded sounds once they'd been freed from their sources. It wasn't supposed to be where you live. You've found the same thing from the other direction: staying in that mode with music that was written to carry harmonic and narrative meaning leaves you with the acoustic residue and none of the payoff. Of course it goes dead on you.
A more radical example is John Cage, because he actually did want people to live there. 4'33" and his percussion work are built on the claim that any sound, heard with full attention and no hierarchy of importance, is worth hearing — that the distinction between music and noise is a prejudice, not a fact. But for Cage, there was a condition: attention has to be total and non-judgmental. It's closer to a meditative discipline than to critical listening, and it's not compatible with also auditioning your system. You can't do Cage and do "how does this recording sound" at the same time; they're different acts.
A favorite of mine, Brian Eno, is between these two. Ambient music is explicitly designed to reward the exact mode you got stuck in — texture, timbre, the grain of a sound sustained over time — because there's no narrative or harmonic argument competing for your attention. That's the whole premise of Music for Airports: music you can listen to closely or not at all, since it isn't going anywhere you'd need to follow.
Morton Feldman's late pieces work on similar terms inside the classical tradition — long, static, so little happens that sound-as-such is what's on offer, and it's enough.
So as I gauge your pattern: you become alienated when you bring Cage's or Eno's listening posture to Strauss. The Alpine Symphony has a dramatic and harmonic argument running through it — glaciers, storms, return — and if you're only tracking transient response and imaging you're not wrong that the meaning goes missing, because you've stopped tracking the thing that carries it. Nothing wrong with your ears. You just borrowed a mode of attention from music built to survive without argument and applied it to music built on nothing else.
