I think I detect an unhealthy degree of self deception in this thread.
My intitial thought is the gear is so unimportant what are these people doing on this site. The site is about the gear. Shouldn't music lovers be on sites about, well, music?
What exactly is wrong about being interested in the equipment. It doesn't mean the music is irrelevant.
Most of my best musical experiences have been on equipment that would recieve a headless panther if reviewed here on ASR.
When I want to listen to music I go to a concert. Mostly home listening is about me being impressed with the sytems capability to allow me to hear things in a mix I haven't noticed before.
Two channel stereo rarely sounds like music to me. Having seen what happens in a studio to the sacred signal there is no way I can convince myself I'm listening to anything except some very clever engineering which sometimes helps with the enjoyment of the music thats playing.
Look at all those alter like sytem pictures; you can't tell me they're about the music. All those graphs, they're about engineering, not music. I'm interested in audio reproduction and have been since my late teens and that means the equipment. Good music sounds good on whatever one plays it on in my experience.
I have over three thousand albums in flac on my hard drives. I listen to music on my equipment most days. I love the sound I get from my equipement, but it is the sound rather than the music more often than not.
I can't even listen to classical music on my system; it bears so little resemblance to the sound one gets at a concert.