What sound experience do real audiophiles want?

Q: Do real audiophiles progressively move toward the most neutral experience they can get?

A: Not all audiophiles, it may be better to use the word "some" instead of "real". Rather than call it "neutral" vs "colored" or "objective" vs "subjective" I think of the listening experience more as being "analytical" vs "fun". I'll explain what I mean.

Some times I want to get the source recording, the whole source recording, and nothing but the source recording. While you may think this desire only extends to classical and/or live performances, in reality there are times when I ant to hear music the way the artists/ producers conceptualized it. So for example when Daft Punk won the "best engineered album" award at the Grammys, I wanted to go back and hear RAM exactly as it was on my source file, ni plus ni moins. And the best way to achieve it is with a neutral DAC, a solid state amp that does not sound too bright or too dark, and something like the HD600.

But at other times I want a completely different experience. I want the violins in Mendelssohn's Concerto in E minor Op 64 to come out of the orchestra and smack me across the face, I want Christina Novelli to breathe in my ear when I hear Garth Emery's "Concrete Angel", and I want that in-your-face Southern rock stance when I listen to 38 Special's "Caught Up In You" and perform right alongside them on stage with my air guitar. And frankly, for any of those scenarios (classical, EDM, rock) when you want a more "fun" experience, the analytic set up fails. So an alternative set up with a warmish DAC, a tube amp and a HD650 or Fidelio X1 will give you a very different (and probably more pleasing) experience than the one I outlined in the previous paragraph.

So what headphones like Grados offer is a "fun" experience. And while "fun" is good, there is a totally different "analytical" experience out there waiting to be discovered. Some may enjoy it, some may not. And for everyone who enjoys an "analytical" experience, there is a "fun" experience waiting around the corner to surprise and thrill them. That's why there are so many headphones out there.

I just realized that everything that I said about headphones also applies to your spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend/significant other. Sometimes you want fun, and sometimes you want analytical.