> . 3. The vast, vast majority of studios master audio to sound good on a wide range of devices ranging from smartphone speakers to earbuds to $50 soundbars.
Great. So I really don't need the expensive stuff then. It will actually be a distortion of what the engineer intended
You don't need the super-expensive stuff anyways. But you're obviously not going to get full frequency range (especially bass) on smartphone speakers.
Additionally, a few genres (notably some jazz and Western classical) as well as select recordings here and there actually do not have "loudness war" issues and might actually have good dynamics. For these, it's nice to have a system that can handle, say, the full blown volume swings of a Romantic-era symphony.
You can probably fulfill these requirements with a system far under $15K. :)
I actually was under the impression that the audiophile market (at least the stereotypical) was fairly "dead"; it was more of a thing in, say, the 1970s-1980s phenomenon (with a follow-up in the late 1990s with the home theater boom) when the gap between consumer electronics and hi-end electronics was a lot bigger, and there was a lot less technical information out there (so mythology over things like cables and flowery descriptions of sound were more rampant).
Great. So I really don't need the expensive stuff then. It will actually be a distortion of what the engineer intended