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10 Wonderful things and 10 bad things about the audiophile world.

10 Problems with the audiophile world.

#1  Speakers and amps need to be made synergistically.

#2  Room acoustics are so much more important than they realize.

#3. High End audio companies rarely show scientific measurements. Why not?

#4  Audiophiles have very little knowledge of music production.

#5  The dealer system in high end audio is not working.

#6  Snake oil is not loathed but treated as an amusing possibility for better sound.

#7  Expensive equipment, confirmation bias, ego, no standards, will eat people who don’t like expensive cables.

#8  Very little blind listening tests.

#9  No use of audio files showing differences in components, before and after.

#10 Audiophiles make subjective decisions claiming to be scientifically objective.

 

10 Wonderful things about the audiophile world.

#1   People who love music.

#2  Smart people who are passionate about the latest technology.

#3  Audiophiles rarely eat people for not liking their new expensive cables.

#4  Being an audiophile is a great hobby.

#5  Being an audiophile is mentally healing.

#6  Audiophiles are trying to make fidelity and quality paramount unlike other industries.

#7  Audiophiles are a strong community.

#8  Samsung / Harden is making lots of money.

#9  Audiophiles are always moving toward a goal.

#10 Audiophiles appreciate beauty.

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Showing 1 response by cundare2

cundare2
213 posts
 

I think this whole thread is a bit silly, but hey, it sucked me in, so whadoeyeno?

Regardless, I have two peripherally related comments:

i) The more one understands about psychoascoustics -- about how the brain perceives audio -- the more obvious it becomes that double-blind tests are not a gold standard for evaluating audio equipment. Hearing is not vision -- one integrates anomalies, the other differentiates; and if youplay the same passage multiple times you can hear different details with eacy playing, regardless of the signal chain. There’s a reason why professional listeners -- guys like the Stereophile & TAS reviewers -- generally use a different methodology.

ii) "Snake Oil" actually had real health benefits. It was a good source of Omega-3 fatty acids, possibly the earliest effective (if inadvertent) prophylactic targeting cardiovascular disease. The term only became pejorative when the market began to be flooded with "fake" snake oil, that pretended to be the real thing. Badaboom. Now you know. Charaterizing something as "true" snake oil should be a compliment.

 

 

 

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