I was thinking along the same lines. But more on LIVE music.
As a budding audiophile, you must have some kind of sonic paradigm, benchmark or standard in mind. In high-fidelity, live chamber (classical or jazz) orchestral or big band music using accoustic instruments (not amplified electric or electronic instruments) performed in a respected auditorium like the CCP (in the absence of a better one) often form the mental standard against which home playback gears are judged. Afterall, you want as close as possible to real sounding performances at home as possible. That's the goal of high fidelity. Don't get me wrong though, you most likely will never achieve a playback system that can sound like the real thing. No one will, with even the most expensive system. But you can at least approach one to impart the necessary illusion when you close your eyes. The quest to high fidelity is a road; the end is nowhere in sight.
Now if you're a Rock, Disco , fussion, techno or Pop fan, that can be difficult since, there is no music in any of these genre that uses un-amplified accoustic instruments in a live performance. So getting any gear with some power or punch can often be impressively satisfying for these types.
But if you can learn to appreciate unamplified music in the jazz and classics then you're on the path serious audiophiles started with. Then you can start auditioning playback systems that to your ears sound close to what you remember in an accoustic concert. Such a standard would be the basis for any upgrades you want to pursue.
If OTH you use any home playback gears as your benchmark or standard, you will never be satisfied as there will always be something better out there; sky's the limit. You have what is called a moving target, as your standard moves from your old gear to your new one, then the next. And you can easily fall into the trap of starting to love and quest for better specified equipment, not better home reproduction of music. There's a very thin line between loving your gears versus the music that they are supposed to reproduce. Your upgrade should measure how close it is to sounding what you remember as live music, and not how far it is from your old gears. There will always be gears out there that will certainly sound very far from what you have in varying degrees, but nowhere even close to sounding as real as you remember it to be. And if your gears sound quite close to what you remember as live music within the budget you have alloted, there's a higher chance that can live with your system for a relatively longer time.
Just a word of caution though. While I say that a live musical performance is the standard, home plaback gears can only approach but never sound like the real thing. Bear in mind that the objective of Hi-Fi playback is the accurate reproduction of the RECORDED material. OTH it is the objective of Hi-Fi recording to capture everything about a performance. Hopefully, the recording engineers did a good job so that the resulting CDs or LPs when played on your home gears sound close to the original performance. But the most an excellent home playback system can do is REVEAL a recording as transparently as technology allows, not reproduce a live performance. That's why audiophiles spend a lot on expensive audiophile-quality recordings from special record labels that do a better job of recording than most to begin with. (Lucky for this generation, the digital medium using high resolution encoding technolgy is making such quality recordings more accessible to many.)
So do try to listen to Music. The real thing. And perhaps what you have may already be closer to it than you think. Just my thoughts.
