I had a 13" black and white television in my bedroom when I was a teen. The big, color Trinitron TV that we got later was amazing. Beyond that, I don’t recall the improvement in quality making sitcoms funnier, or the stories better.

In fact, to me, the old, fuzzy NTSC video is better in some ways. It helps with the suspension of disbelief, the feeling of watching a story on the screen. Even 1080p is sometimes too good, to the point that the actors fall into the Uncanny Valley, like I’m watching a live play, but not quite. Instead of a story, I see the makeup on skin, the wardrobe choices, the blocking, and the bad CGI backgrounds.

I can certainly hear the quality differences in audio, but I feel like past a certain minimum, I’m listening to the music, not the equipment. Like, my Shokz had a noticeable lack of bass when I got them, but I’ve adapted, and don’t hear them that way any longer. The convenience of open-ear headphones far exceeds any gain in quality.

I care a little bit. I’ve got my good 5.1 sound system for the TV but I don’t see the necessity to invest into an Atmos system. The TV can display 4k with HDR but I’m satisfied with HD SDR stuff. When playing games 60 fps is nice but I won’t die if my Steam Deck can only manage 30 fps.

So, most stuff is usually good enough for me. And at the moment I can’t leave my bed anyways so I can live with laptop speakers.

Perspective: My SO didn’t really care at first why I didn’t want to use the built-in TV speakers, but rather install some higher-end speakers and a DAC to drive them. After a while, she went to visit a friend and came back to celebrate our setup.

Value: Do you need a super-big, expensive TV or a smaller, higher PPI TV that you can sit closer to? What you really want is clarity, brightness, color, and smooth video. If people could never afford such a display and only had crappy TVs with bad video sources and only some smartphones as an alternative, the smartphone beats everything they know, of course. But if they could never afford high quality video sources and displays, how could they appreciate those things?

IMHO better than average is enough for everyday life. There’s more to life than spending money and not experiencing life to the fullest. That means I focused on a nicer Bluetooth headset, some better than average speakers for both TV and PC, … so I simply approach the point of diminishing returns on the quality scale, knowing full well I could do much better. But it’s not worth the effort to me if it slowly turns into either a game of high spending or a full-blown refurbishing hobby. Same with my car: I buy them used at about 4~6 years old and sell them at 8~10 years old, spending the least amount of money while driving mostly luxury cars with lots and lots of extras.

Yes I do, and a price increase of only $10 (so $30 vs $20) makes a big difference in sound quality for a pair of headphones for work (meetings and some music off Youtube). So it’s not even about hifi (at that price range, of course not), it’s about giving a shit and do a little research / testing before settling on a slightly better low end consumer product. Or, given a certain budget, maximise the quality for it, again, by doing some research beforehand, no matter what you plan to buy. But, most people are lazy.

When it comes to music, it also depends on a person’s tastes. Ariana Grande sounds the same to me weather played on Sennheiser headphones or a microwave oven.

Here’s a factor that seems to be underappreciated. Those differences are a lot less important when you aren’t comparing side by side. Just because you can hear or taste the difference between a thing and a more expensive version doesn’t mean you will really appreciate that difference later. Diminishing returns does play into this, and the small differences between two things at a high level is often too small for your memory to even capture.

And even when it comes to the bigger differences, how it affects enjoyment has a large psychological component, in how much satisfaction do you get just knowing you are using something excellent, and does it bother you knowing what you are experiencing could be better.

I have nice quality speakers and headphones, but sometimes I’m lazy and will listen to a piece of music through my crappy laptop or phone speakers. I still enjoy that music. And if that was all I had access to, I’d still enjoy the hell out of music. I’m not about to give away or stop using my nice speakers, but I’m not convinced they make me happier in any significant way.

Audiophile equipment is full of placebos and scams. But there’s also a lot of very real improvements. I would also say the majority of people are well before the point of diminishing returns but hey.

One big problem is that the source of your music often is the limiting factor. A lot of music sounds not so great on my nice headphones. .Likewise, the songs I really appreciate on my headphones, but sound like mush on shitty speakers. That doesn’t make either music bad, they know their audience but If I didn’t like much of the hifi music then I probably wouldn’t care much about my sound setup.

I think like most things there’s a balance to be had. Obsessing about the little stuff can often get in the way of enjoying it, and be a massive waste of money. But I also wear headphones for 10+hrs a day, it’s worth investing in them.

Audio, yes, to a certain degree. With video I don’t care that much, as long as there aren’t any details I’d miss on lower res. The resolution I use on YouTube is normally a result of the audio quality that comes with.

Back in the 90’s when MP3 sharing via modem was common, the “normal” bitrate was 128kbit/s, and people often commented that I refused to download and save them. 160kbit/s was OK. 256kbit/s was preferred.

I wouldn’t call myself an audiophile, I just really hate it when instruments and voices sound like rusty chains being dragged across a washboard.

As I mentioned above, I’m not that picky. Possibly environmentally damage from sailing the high seas 20-25 years ago to watch myself favorite TV shows. I don’t mind pixels and visual compression artifacts that much.

Our car has an awful sound system. I swear there are frequencies simply missing, and that transforms music in ways that are impossible to miss.

Or one would think, but my spouse doesn’t care at all. I offered to go through the trouble of upgrading the entire thing – receiver, dsp, amp, speakers, adding a sub – but they said no, why bother? Almost makes me weep when some of my favorites play on the radio.

I can’t tell the difference between the highest, top tier audio and like, decent audio, but shitty tv speakers or headphones and such absolutely kills me.

I’m one of those who don’t care and it annoys my friends. I can tell the difference when comparing setups side by side but when normally watching content, a lower quality doesn’t bother me unless you literally can’t read the words on the screen so anything over 720p is usually good enough. Maybe other people have different thresholds.

It’s also about priorities. If you consider portability good, then no sound system will ever beat your laptop speakers just because they are already on your laptop. I assume it’s the same for people watching Netflix on their phone.

I’m a musician. I can’t afford top tier sound!

Tbh I can live with what I’ve got at home. A garden variety setup today still sounds better than something high-end did when I was growing up. Just give me some decent channel separation and I can zone out.

Where there is still significant room for improvement is in stage sound. Why do monitors always have to sound like sh*t? It’s like bands spend all their budget on amps and PAs and whatever dregs are left over go to the monitors. And house sound. Don’t even get me started. Maybe their gear was good once (probably not) but it’s invariably seen one beer spill too many.

I can’t tell the difference between 1080p and 4k due to eye problems and shit eyesight. My bedroom TV is 720p lmao (but TBF that’s because it’s ancient and I don’t want to deal with smart TV bullshit). So no.

I’m a bit pickier with audio but will also listen to music through cheap earbuds

It’s all transparent to me unless I bought a potato

I am very aware of the differences in quality but am mostly okay with bad equipment and/or bad settings. The most important thing is to be able to clearly see and hear what’s supposed to be clear and only especially incompetent or especially pretentious media doesn’t get mastered to work well on shoddy displays and/or speakers by those standards.

The one thing I absolutely cannot tolerate is HDR mode on TVs without enough of a maximum luminance to actually do HDR, so they and up looking way worse than SDR.

The idea of not caring about binocular quality is truly mystifying. Binoculars’ only job is to make things as easy to see as possible.

I just want to say how happy I am that good sounding audio equipment and large screen TVs are relatively cheap. With a bit of research and tinkering, one can have a nice A/V setup for not much $$$. Of note, I am very impressed with the audio quality of Class D amplifiers nowadays. I was conditioned to believe that Class D would always be inferior until I tried it myself.