To expand on this a bit, I appreciate some audio overkill because, if I do hear sizzle or distortion, it eliminates one possible reason and helps me figure out what’s actually happening.

It’s like having gigabit internet to my house: I don’t actually need it, but when a website is slow, I know the problem isn’t in my internet connection.

Well, at least there are objective performance benchmarks on cars, and some of them are okay proxies of performance in motorsports.

https://www.carwow.co.uk/blog/carwow-quarter-mile-400-metre-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_N%C3%BCrburgring_Nords...

Correct. I've paid for Tidal for a decade because I just like the peace of mind that it's closer to the original recording. I'm sure it's mostly placebo, but I like it.

I'd distinguish between differences that anyone can detect but some may not care about, and differences that may not be objectively detectable at all. Muscle cars, at least, are different in a way that anyone can see. Push that pedal to the floor and it feels different from a Honda Civic or whatever. Whether that difference is actually interesting or good is, of course, a matter of taste. Whereas audiophile nonsense is often indistinguishable even to the connoisseur and depends entirely on some form of self-deception. Still could be worth it, depending on what one considers worthy.

That’s actually a really good comparison, especially because - yes I can hear the difference between an excruciatingly lossless digitization of a piece of music that I’m intimately familiar with, played back on expertly configured hardware… but the difference is so little, that most of the time, I’m find just listening to it at medium high quality streaming on a pair of <$50 headphones.

I’ve played with the nice toys, and they are nice, but for 100x the price, they barely deliver 1.5x the experience.