Recovering audiophile here. I used to continually chase gains until I got more into the professional side of things (I’ve been making music myself for a couple of decades). I ended up getting a few TOTL setups and I regret not doing that sooner. I went through entirely too many mediocre headphones and speakers before just spending the money on high-end studio monitors. I’d recommend people check out the pro offerings from ATC, Focal, Barefoot, PSI, DynAudio, Adam, etc. My living room setup now is literally just a MiniDSP SHD to handle Spotify/ AirPlay streaming and preamp duties into the active monitors. Vinyl setup runs through a Muffsy phono preamp kit I built. Headphones are mainly a high-end set of custom IEMs, Shure electrostatics, and Senn HD800S with a nice RME interface as DAC + amp. All that solved my GAS on the listening side, now I take all the money I’ve been saving there and put it into interesting synths and eurorack ;)
The pro side has some weird beliefs and desires too though, like an obsession with vintage gear including stuff like early digital reverbs. Plenty of pros believe that Mogami Gold cables are actually better in terms of sound quality, but my studio is wired up with Canare star quad for the extra noise rejection and a lot of GLS plus some Hosa patch cables as I’ve found their connectors to be good-enough quality and the cables are generally easy enough to work with / durable without being overly expensive. Megabuck old-school gear like LA-2As, 1176es, Neve 1073s, Neumann U67 and more-recent Sony C800-G mics, Manley compressors, etc all have crazy followings and people are always GASing for them, but they won’t make a crap song magically sound good, only take an already-good song and take it up another 10% (and even then only in skilled hands). So much more can be achieved by most folks with just more practice and education around mixing, yet everyone wants to spend their way to better sound.
Instruments and their amps are arguably even worse, with guitar and synth players as large contributors (I’m guilty as heck here too). We always want that perfect axe that we somehow believe will take us to the next level, or that vintage CS-80 or Rhodes. We know we’d be better off practicing and learning our instruments better, but instead we endlessly tweak Kemper profiles, swap strings / pickups / picks, rewire pedal boards, rearrange modular synths, and most importantly, read, talk about, and pine for the next gear purchase. It’s madness. There’s even a joke in the modular community that making music is the least important part of modular synths. “Music? Never heard of it. My $8000 electronic mission center only does microtonal bleeps and bloops in Euclidean cycles.”
But anyway, hobbies are fun. Sad to see Onkyo go, but not that sad as I never actually owned any of their gear. They seemed like a cheaper Denon. I was always more into the DIY side of home audio before I switched to pro gear, with folks like Nelson Pass and Siegfried Linkwitz as personal heroes. Don’t forget Roger Linn and Daphne Oram on the creation side!