I realized I wasn't a serious audiophile a long time ago, but still went through a quest to improve sound. My first receiver was a cheap plastic thing that pro

I realized I wasn't a serious audiophile a long time ago, but still went through a quest to improve sound. My first receiver was a cheap plastic thing that produced an enormous amount of white noise floor- a loud hiss not much quieter than the music itself. I went through several receivers until I found one that didn't hiss so badly, but I found that the volume wasn't very impressive (turning the knob mainly just increased hiss and distortion). I learned later that most people address this using a preamp, although at the time I was poor and couldn't buy one. I mostly listen to soundboard recordings of live music (Grateful Dead and Phish) where some recordings are fantastic and others aren't. My personal favorite reference to listen to is Dave Brubeck's Take Five- although it has a high noise floor, the recording is still excellent (I like to listen to the creaking of the bass during the drum solo because it's quiet and in the background). Over time I moved away from speakers because I'm rarely in a situation where I can listen at the volume I like without people either asking me to turn it down or leave. I got a pair of Sennhauser headphones- nothing fancy- and am quite happy listening to my desktop computer through that. Switching to another set of headphones- it immediately sounded terrible and I had to play with various settings (turns out the audio driver was trying to send through lots of very low frequency and the headphones made a shambles of that). There was a period where mp3 encoding was terrible and generated obnoxious artifacts. Nowadays many mp3 128k recordings are fine for me. So for me, while not an audiophile, these things matter: reduce hiss to an acceptable level, get headphones or speakers you like, and use EQ to tune it to a sound that works for you.