When engineering and testing new components, engineered from scratch, there are always two categories that I follow: emotions and sound.
Emotions have a very high priority to me, but the sound could be used as an instrument in audio to make music more understandable.
If one does good in engineering, everything makes sense, it becomes music instead of hifi. Hifi for me is sound without the ability to present the music in an analytical manner, without presenting it in a context. That's what most audio gear can do. We can talk about it's sound, without the understanding of the music. Celibidache once said, there is sound without music, and there is sound which leads towards the music.
If a component is correct in this regard, it always can sort the puzzle and put the musicians in the right place making their play understandable.
That's what I'm searching for in music reproduction and that's what music makes enjoyable to me.
The real enjoyment could only be when this analytical approach is given to equipment, but it has to be added with the spice of much emotional impact to the listener.
There are audio gears out there, which can deliver a puzzle of fragments of music without any sort of emotion to the listener.
Some listeners prefer this way of listening, it's the intelectual approach of music audition.
Others don't need this, they are happy, when the emotional approach is satisfied. They are lucky, most of this gear can be had for cheap.
But even here, not every cheap gear can fulfill this attribute of emotional reproduction. Modern transistor amps combined with digital audio mostly isn't able to do so, relative cheap analog combined with tube amps can be very satisfying.
So first, you have to determine what kind of listener you are, the emotional one, the intelectual one or the combination of both.
The combination listener has to pay high prices for satisfaction in music reproduction and IMHO it needs the gear of the highest quality.
The intelectual listener can be satisfied with the ordinary, modern high end gear in audio, often this gives him (or her) goosebumps, because it's super analytical, highly neutral but in general much less emotional (but he doesn't want this aspect anyway).
One has to find out, what is the most satisfactional category of gear for oneself and then, after knowing that, just searching for gear of that category. For that, profound knowledge of the sound of audio gear is necessary, or consult an expert on this topic to have him help you.
It's not in general the case that age reduces the ability to feel goosebumps with reproduced music. In my case, the more I did know what kind of gear and music stuff turns me on, the closer I was able to move in this direction to get kicks out of it. Despite the ongoing aging process, I was not able to watch a reduced ability for music to make me happy and give endless emotions.
