I’ve heard pretty good stereo. Hell, I’ve heard pretty good mono, quad, and 5.1. And Atmos, although that’s still to come in my room (update coming soon, I promise). When I was a kid, back in my first 60s, my dad built a hi-fi with a Harmon-Kardon tuner preamp, a University coaxial speaker, and an amplifier of his own design (he was an electronic engineer). It sounded better than anything else I’d heard. Stereo was a new revelation, and when I was in the Army, after a few promotions, I had enough cash and good px prices that I could buy a halfway decent stereo system. A couple of years working for Altec-Lansing exposed me to an “audiophile” grade stereo (all electronics and speaker cabinets desogned and built by the engineer I worked with), and I understood how my Army-bought setup wasn’t all that great.
About that time, a neighbor had heard my setup, and decided to upgrade, and have me a couple of pretty tinny dipole speakers that I paralled with the fronts, and ended up with my first surround setup. It was interesting and pleasing, but definitely not high-end. I upgraded to being able to play SQ and have continued to improve ever since. Somewhere along the line, I got invited to a listening session of shellac 78s. This guy had almost as many 78s as Michael Fremer has LPs! And the recording of Jose Mojica sounded absolutely sublime.
Bottom line is that the performance matters to me far more than the equipment it’s played on. There are people who play music to listen to their equipment, qnd there are people who use their equipment to listen to music. While I may swing towards the former from topime to time, it’s really the music that matters most to me.