5 Dumb Things Audiophiles Believes.

I buy all my equipment from sith audio and they sold me a special sauce tweak that only my golden ear can appreciate.

@bubba_buoy 

+1 I think you got it.

Human beings have a remarkably wide range of sensitivity to our various senses.

An example: in the early 2000s when Tiger Woods had an entire team at Nike building golf clubs for him, the team sent him 2 drivers that they believed were identical.  After Tiger took a few 125mph swings with each model, he messaged back to the lab:  "I like the lighter one."  Which mystified the team, who couldn't wait to get the clubs back to weight them.  When they did, they discovered one of the drivers was, indeed, lighter - by less than 2 grams, or about 0.5% of the club's total weight.  You could ask 100 more golf pros to repeat that experiment, and it's likely none of them would detect the difference.  Tiger had "golden hands" even amongst PGA pros.

While "golden ears" may not belong to everyone who says the have them... it's equally silly to suggest there are not people who can hear musical/audio details  better than 99% of the rest of us.  I'm willing to believe that some of those people exist among the small community of professional audio reviewers.  For that reason I wouldn't automatically judge that a reviewer could not, for example, hear a dramatic difference between two power cables... even though I haven't been able to reproduce that effect myself. 

 

What a waste of time. An ugly redneck with a duck voice telling me I can't hear differences between power cables? LOL, no thanks, hard pass. He's a disservice to the community, in truth.

Would you hear the man differently if he was groomed differently, like say, an urban bro look? A stuffed-shirt Corporate Executive? Perhaps the shallow Senator take on "best dressed"?

I'm sensing a world of unclothed emperors and pricked egos out there. My takeaway is don't take yourself too seriously when making claims that are too frequently based largely on personal subjective experiences. The quality of my musical judgement is not directly proportional to the irrational sums of cash I gleefully plunk down. 

It also bears repeating that he says if it brings you pleasure, enjoy. Just don't bore the rest of us with a claim to have drunk from the cup of acoustic omniscience.