The audiophile community is an interesting one. It is often incredibly easy to empirically demonstrate that most of the snake oil they dump thousands of dollars in does nothing of value. But they spend that money anyways. They are like more boring versions of flat earthers.

My favorite recent discovery was a device that shaves a bit of plastic off the edge of your CDs to improve the sound quality. The manufacturer makes lots of claims about it improving how the light interacts with the polycarbonate, none of which makes any sense. But we don't need a materials scientist or a physicist to explain why their science is bunk, we can just make a hash of the CD before and after "shaving" it to see that the data is still identical.

The answer is always that you can spend whatever you'd like on home audio gear.

If you have 20 dollars, you can find yourself something that makes sounds. If you have 2 million dollars sitting around, I bet these sounded some amount better:

https://news.softpedia.com/news/Transmission-Audio-039-s-Ult...

Those were 2009 dollars.