At this point I'm a "vintage audiophile." I've had most of my gear a long time, and I'm mostly satisfied with it. Dahlquist DQ-10s; Marantz 7c preamp; McIntosh MR-67 tuner. The subwoofer is one we built when when I worked at Speakercraft, a St. Louis custom-design speaker store, now out of business. At the moment I'm driving the DQ-10s with a Threshold CS-2, and not sure if I want to leave it that way or put back the Electron Kinetics Eagle 2a. Using a Sumo Andromeda to drive the subwoofer at the moment. I used to have it in the main channel. JVC XL-Z1050 CD player. Thorens turntable, Grace arm & cartridge. If I didn't have the DQ-10s I would probably have Magneplanars.
Cables? Well, I think the Acoustic Research jobs I got open-box at Best Buy, sound a little better than the ones I made up from RG-59. But the Kimber Cables I picked up from eBay don't sound any better than the ones I made up from microphone cable. The rest of my cables are homemade, from Canare cable, using gold-plated connectors. Oh yeah the speaker cables are 12-guage zip cord. I'm mostly in the "look, all there is is resistance, capacitance, and inductance" camp.
A problem I have with seeking perfection in an audio system is that we judge them on the basis of whether we can hear things that you can't hear in a live concert hall. Things like soundstage & imaging, and whether you can tell that the piccolo is left of the flute "and you know (someone will say), with the Garbanzo cables in place, I think I can tell the Piccolo is actually behind the flute" Well, you can't hear all that from the Dress Circle boxes in Powell Hall. Is the solo violinist standing to the conductor's left? Who knows: close your eyes in Orchestra Hall, and the violin sounds like it's the size of the whole proscenium arch. Yet someone will spend a king's ransom for cables to hear this miniscule difference.
Isaac Stern used Magneplanar speakers in his living room. When asked if they sounded to him the same as the real orchestra, he replied, "No, but they sound the way I would want an orchestra to sound in my living room."
At least in photography, we accept that the photograph is an abstraction of reality, not reality itself. (Devotees of IMAX, Cinerama, and Ultra Panavision 70 are an exception.)
I can enjoy a little Tschaikovsky even if I can tell I'm not in Symphony Hall. So you tell me: Am I an audiophile?