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It's just orthorexia for your ears.

Guys (I have never encountered a female audiophile of the "fancy cables and magic pens" variety) like talking about gear. Many hobbies have forums in which microscopic details of expensive products get scrutinized. Bikes, cameras, cars, outdoor gear, knives. Audiophilia is the same.

It certainly used to be the case in the valve era that results were extremely variable. It is still the case that speaker construction matters a lot. But now, in 2021? At the kind of volumes you might reasonably want in your house, pretty much any class D amplifier that has been competently constructed will do the job really well. You need reasonable efforts to avoid PSU noise and accidentally amplifying EMI and that's it. You can get high-quality DACs on a single chip for about $10. https://www.mouser.co.uk/c/?marcom=110885714

That creates a serious problem for hobbyists: there's no longer a barrier to entry! There's no longer an expensive climb up to the higher echelons. What do you do when the gate you were keeping has been bypassed by the affordable electronics barbarians? You have to retreat to a more esoteric ivory tower.

I don't really follow the forums as much as I used to, but diyAudio [1] always seemed like it had a good distribution of domain experts to help quash the craziness.

[1] https://www.diyaudio.com/

audiosciencereview is also okay.

It seems to get worse the more money the posters have (maybe because salesmen get to sell them more weird speakers), and also if they're British they start talking about special power cables and something called PRAT.

Headphone reviews often seem to have incorrect claims about "speed" and "effortlessness", although I think those might actually describe something, just not what they think it is.

While looking for a longer TOSLINK cable today I ran across some gold plated ones on Amazon. I guess nothing sounds better than thinking it's the best.

I think that folks just like to dabble in domains where you can "be your own expert" or at least "choose your own expert." This is impossible if you need to be a technical expert to understand electrical and acoustic measurements, and have a pile of test equipment. And it becomes utterly demotivating if working harder to get better results only proves that what you're seeking is nonexistent or irrelevant.

It may also be related to why people want to "do the research" and discover things like their own homegrown immunization protocol, rather than just going and getting a vaccine.

This is an aspect of the audiophile community, I've never quite understood. At work, we have clear cut engineering goals, based on customer requirements, we strive to reach, with empirical measurements of product prototypes. Whether it's loudspeakers or cabinets designs, we're optimizing for variables such as coverage pattern, sensitivity, long-term power handling, etc. It's a holistic, system design approach to the "product". We rarely even think about a lot of the metrics the audiophile cares such much about, except in the design of QC systems for End-of-line testing, to catch manufacturing defects. Most of these items, like various avenues of distortion, are designed around in the early phases of development, by simple mechanical or electrical engineering choices, such as motor design, suspension design, cone material choices, etc.

I just always find it interesting. No customer has ever asked me for the plot of distortion products vs freq for a loudspeaker in pro-audio. Or the metallurgic compositions of the tinsel wires.

I like to blame it on Stereophile magazine losing their mind as digital sources of music took over. Turntables / cartridges etc you can pretty much make up what you want about how they sound due to the sheer amount of noise and medium speed integrity issues involved, making it very hard to call them out on their subjective biases.

Digital isn't perfect but compared to what an analogue playback system does, it might as well be considered as such. It gave them nothing to write about when a $120 disc player could reproduce audio as well as a $2000 player. They seemed to have doubled and tripled down on the nonsense ever since.

Not sure why audiophiles fall for it, other than the general "tweakiness" aspect of some audio enthusiasts who are always looking for the next thing to spend their money on. It's tough to have a hobby when if you buy the gear, you have little to complain about until it's made obsolete.

I'm on the opposite side of finding it interesting though. There is a lot of "your ears aren't good enough" dog piling going on to shout down any doubts about cables and whatnot.

I think a big part of the anti-digital backlash was due to the fact that many early Compact Disc albums sounded terrible. They had a big budget for their original analog production, but the record companies cheaply repurposed their back catalogs to digital media for a quick buck. Albums originally produced during the CD era sound fine in digital.

Not denying that there is a lot of hogwash to go along as well...

Yeah, it's just goofy. I find it interesting only for the novelty aspect of it I guess. Maybe that was the wrong word to use. Maybe horrifying. My hobby, photography, doesn't seem to be nearly as bad though. It has a lot of the same problems, as the Guitar speaker industry, arguments about the art, and coloration, but it's really missing the $3000 IEC cable aspect, that seems to thrive in the audiophile community.

I suspect the relevant difference here between a hobby like photography and something like sound systems is whether it feels like the hobbyist has to exert themselves in addition to using the tool or whether the tools allow for purely passive consumption. Most hobbies where you have to "exert yourself," whether that's in the form of going out and taking pictures or e.g. getting on a bike and riding around have some element of the community that looks down (often with varying degrees of condescension) on people who buy a ton of expensive gadgets but don't have the ability to actually use those gadgets well. There's often some pride in being able to "get the job done" with the cheapest equipment possible to show how much of one's work is individual ability rather than technological help.

That element probably ends up being some sort of counterbalancing social force to unbridled gadget consumption whose end product is $3000 cables.

A thought I've had about the $3000 cables, is that they may serve mostly as loss leaders, in the following sense: A person may believe that the $3000 cables are a rip-off, and satisfy themselves with $300 cables instead.

Oh that's a fun thought.

Japan is part of the problem; all the consumer audio companies over there are selling something called "Hi-Res Audio" that's complete snake oil, but meanwhile all their music is still ultra-compressed loudness war mastering.

Maybe the problem is nothing they make can compare to used Stax electrostatics.

And I definitely agree about Stereophile. They tried to clean up their act in the latest years, but. They are just too tied down to those advertisers, to ever put on a hard stance. I don't take the magazine anymore. Highly recommend ALMA's Voice-Coil magazine still, if you want to read about the industry.

I've observed similar things as a musician who plays an amplified instrument. I'm also quite curious about the inner workings of gear, and am a measurement scientist by day.

I think there's a social custom in the community, that relates to "you can be your own expert." That is, opinions are weighted by some function other than technical knowledge and expertise, such as status as a musician, enthusiasm, cost of equipment owned, etc. Nobody wants to come out and say: "You're imagining things." Technical discussions often erupt into flame wars.

And there are some areas where things are probably measurably different, and it boils down to taste, but the measurements are hard to do. I can hear differences between the two instruments that I own. Does that mean I'm bonkers?

At the same time, engineers who aren't immersed in this field tend to be polarized into two extremes: Some are audiophiles. Others simply dismiss everything as audiophile nonsense.

But the issues that come up in such experiments, are never about audiophile variables. No one has ever said, this Monitor has too much distortion, or that I need to increase the the sampling rate to to 192kHz to fix the tops, or that it would sound better if I had used oxygen free silver wire, etc. etc. What comes up is practical concerns about loudspeakers on stage. Reduce the boominess of the low end, reduce the propensity to feedback on stage, etc. Same goes with working on guitar speakers.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I ended up starting my own sound company to help lessen the divide between engineering and the end-user, where I get to go out and try and use our products for a number of real shows every year. But it's not really the same issue, as the non-sense the pervades in the audiophile industry.

In my typical setup, I try and work as a stage hand, and let normal FOH and monitor engineers work with the products, where I can observe all the issues that crop up. That way I can get clean feedback from band members, and production staff without, being tainted by association with the brand.

As a mixing engineer: The truth is that most audiophiles get the the factors that impact the perception of music completely wrong.

They are all shiny toys, but care surprisingly little about acoustics — a field that is known to have the highest impact on any listening environment. Then you have to realize you are human. I hear the same mix differently, when I listen to it for a second time without a break inbetween. I listen to it differently at any time of the day, depending on the mood, if I ate, depending on the weather. And I need to know these differences in perception because I have to deal with them when mixing.

Isn't the end goal of Hifi to listen to music in a way you can enjoy? Of course looks and how a setup "feels" makes a difference there, but I got the feeling many audiophiles are beyond enjoying music. I guess there is a reason why they are 99% male