Comment by stinos

even a half-decent sound system was the kind of luxury I (or my parents) wouldn't have splurged on

It's not just the sound system that is the issue, in fact, it's usually the least of the problems. Speaker placement + listening room are the main problem. Quarter decent would do as well. Anything which isn't complete crap and has separate speakers, which could easily be found 2nd hand for cheap when we were young, is sufficient to bring out most of what is in songs like Vogue (it was after all also produced to be played on average systems). But that requires that instead of the "let's just place 2 speakers next to the amp and we're done" some basic care is taken wrt speaker placement in relation to room shape.

I figured this out by accident when I was about 10, having spent all my savings (like 50$ or so) on a 2nd hand old (think 70's) amp + speakers: I couldn't wait to play something on my system so unloaded it from my dad's car, outside in the garden, soldered a cable to go from my walkman to whatever input the thing had, turned the thing on and was blown away. Like listening to new songs. Simply because I happened to place them roughly the way I saw on pics in magazines, and eleminated any reflections because I was in the garden. So even though by todays' standards the raw reproduction capabilities i.e. frequency response of the system was very subpar, simply making the stereo work roughly correctly and having some bass with it, makes a huge difference. Hence after moving the system into my bedroom there was again disappointment because it was not quite as good anymore. Though after some experimenting it was still waaaaaay better and more resolving than anything I heard before (except headphones maybe, but that's a different thing wrt stereo imaging and bass), including my more wealthy family's rather expensive systems simply because they were all just dumped in a room.