...Also, of course, people's perception of sound quality varies enormously, SWMBO for instance is perfectly happy listening to her favourite, band Westlife, on the crappy little speakers built into her iPad and will not listen to either the CD player in the lounge with proper speakers distanced nicely, nor the BT speaker system and yet she goes to their live concerts almost annually, WTF!!
I think there is a lot of difference in how people appreciate music; it seems in my experience there are two fundamental approaches:
Reliving vs
Remembering.
The
Reliving approach is the
Home Theater/Concert Hall/Listening Room approach and revolves as much, if not more so, around the satisfaction derived from reproducing the original experience as closely as possible as it is the feeling of the original experience itself.
The
Remembering approach usually is the
headphones/handy speaker/whatever player happens to be at hand approach; it revolves entirely around reminding oneself
in the moment at hand of the feelings one had at the original experience, and requires much less visceral reproduction of the sound, as the experience is almost entirely in one's head.
I'll let all y'all decide for yourself which aspect is most relevant in your own case; though most of us nerds generally tend more towards the
"visceral reproduction" approach in both audio and video than the
"listening with the mind's ear/seeing with the mind's eye" approach.
There is of course another alternative POV, which says that
the sound mixer/recording engineer listens to all of it through headphones while s/he is making the master;
so why shouldn't we listen to it that way...? mnem