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How rare is an audiophile

I’ve been extremely busy lately and not had a chance to sit back and listen to music  on my system for a few weeks. I’ve streamed my favorite music in the car and on a small JBL Flip-4 portable speaker; which by the way “punches way above its size class.”  I continued to enjoy music whenever, wherever, and however i can during this “dry spell.”

So now its 5 am Sunday morning. I know i’ll be spending most of the day listening on the JBL when my wife and I drive out to a lake house we bought recently and are furnishing and getting ready for 4 generations to enjoy lake life this summer and for years to come. 
I’ve let my system warm up and hit play on my CD player. I now find myself in total bliss listening to Chris Standing’s newest CD “The Lovers Re-mix Collection.”  The effect of the quality of the sound of the music my wife and i are enjoying right now with a cup of coffee is hard to explain, but it brought literal tears of joy.  

I started thinking, how many people are like us?  What % of the population are audiophiles (whatever your definition of an audiophile is)?

I know the answer is heavily dependent on which country you live in. I live in the US along with ~332,000,000 fellow citizens (please, lets not get political on the meaning of population or citizen). 
Are we the 0.1%ers?  Are there ~332,000 audiophiles in the US?

i’d be interested in what others think about how rare our species is.

ezstreams

Showing 3 responses by cd318

cd318
2,636 posts
 

@dweller 

Hasn't music appreciation been removed from Grammer, Middle and (except for Band) High School? The communists know, you have to get to kids when they are young else they are lost. This goes for music as well.

In Catholic school second grade, we gathered, without notice, in the assembly hall. For a good two hours listened to about twenty classical musicians play. Overwhelming and inspiring. In high school, we'd listen to the same (classical) music day-after-day. Our wise music teacher borrowed this technique from top 40 radio until we started to "appreciate" what we were hearing.

 

Great post, brought back memories from my first school where we sat in the assembly hall and listened to various recordings.

2 memories still remain. 

Those programmes often featured the voice of children's presenter Johnny Morris who famous for doing his animal impressions of animal voices talking.

Secondly, at some point they changed the speakers and I didn't like the changeover. It really bothered even at 5/6 years old.

Does this mean I was born an audiophile?

This is an interesting question, but one I've never considered before. Although I have family all over the world I can't say there's a single audiophile amongst any of them.

Not one.

Even my sister with her Sony / NAD/ JBL system would necer consider herself as an audiophile.

My nephew thinks his Bose headphones sound really good, but I don't think that would qualify him either.

 

Of course just what actually is an audiophile is open to debate, but I think most of us here would say that to qualify as one you have to place considerable (everyone else might say undue) emphasis upon sound quality.

 

Unfortunately, by that definition, this also includes those people who seem to love equipment more than actually listening to music. Heck, I used to be one of those myself.

The same might also apply to inveterate tweakers. Yes, I was one of those too, but these days to quote Andrew Robinson, I'd consider myself a recovering audiophile when it comes to equipment fetish and tweakery.

Given that sheer weight of numbers against us, perhaps we should be asking ourselves, what's wrong with us?

 

Or perhaps it's them, not us?

cd318
2,636 posts
 

@searoll923 

main problem I've seen with my generation: they prioritize convenience over quality.

Unfortunately, as the pace of modern life increases our ability to evolve with it doesn't keep up.
With so many increasing demands upon people today, so many demands upon their attention, it would seem very few of us have the time to indulge in this, what can be a very time consuming passion.

Half a century of feminism has left many women now by necessity trying to do two roles (and paying taxes as they do) in the same time as their predecessors had to only do one.

Some get extra support from their partners, some don't. If they do, then those partners get less spare time. There has been a generational shift, and whether they like it or not, young men today are expected to contribute to household chores and child rearing to a far greater extent than previous generations.

No one, except the wealthy who can afford hired home help get more time today.

Therefore, given these extra demands on time, it's almost inevitable that convenience will always be more attractive to most of us.

 

@samureyex 

Good point.

Since most of us are male, that rules out half the potential candidates straight away.

The resurgence of vinyl, if it is maintained, might help somewhat I think. Fiddling around with cartridges, tracking weights, alignment, phono stages, isolation etc more or gets into the audiophile club automatically via the equipment route, doesn't it?

To gain access via with an interest in enhanced sound quality is very unlikely considering that digital has already levelled that particular playing field considerably.

If you want better sound quality, you will need to start off with better recordings - and that, given the priorities of the music industry is just not going to happen anytime soon.

I can listen to 3 or 4 versions of Who's Next and even on my system the differences are fairly marginal between the best and the worst.

How on earth could I make the average music listener see the point of doing this?

Especially when they can stream that album from a variety of sources that claim their offering is Super HD, or even Ultra Hd etc etc.

It might help if the streaming services were to state the provenance of the tracks they are offering, plus mastering credits, DR numbers etc but I can't see that happening anytime soon either.

Let's face, only folks like us care about such things, and most of us came from a time when there were such easily detectable differences in sound quality that we could care.

cd318
2,636 posts
 

@thsaunders 

Fortunate to have traveled extensively... the common thread of the truly impressive individuals with whom lasting friendships have endured, is their including music in their lives, from epicurean tastes to the raw “thwannng” of a R&R ripping guitar score and even a Swiss mountain horn.

These individuals reflected every level of humanity from the Palestinian whose house was demolished by a neighboring nations bull dozer, to the artisan that fixed my plumbing (as in kitchen sink and also the surgeon when my body needed dry dock and repair) to business people and actually heads of state here and overseas.  

That common thread of “need for music” and appreciation for its complexity has become part of my “elevator chat encounters” that provide an initial “size up” of character.

 

Nicely put. For 5 minutes or so I was somewhere else. I was a little put out to realise that my teenage daughter hardly shares any of my musical tastes or any deep interest in sound quality, and neither does my wife. Or maybe they secretly do, but just won't admit it yet? I can hope.

I don't believe its elitist to judge people by their tastes in music. Most of the time it makes good sense and gives you an immediate bearing on where that person is coming from.

In those cases where someone is unfamiliar with certain piece of music opportunities can arise where you are able to introduce each other with selections they might find sympathetic. Quite often a personal recommendation can be far more helpful than reading what some critic has written in a magazine book.

Of course, there are those with whom the musical gulf is not easily bridgeable and there's very little that can be done to amend that.

Perhaps it's just a question of where you are prepared to draw the line.

Belonging to an informal (usually 3 member) music club I've been introduced to a far wider range of music than I would have been on my own.

I've enjoyed most of it too, even if I did tend to drift off a little whilst some Drum and Bass was being tested out or some Northern Soul.

Quite surprisingly, I'm even gradually drifting towards Prog Rock, a genre I detested some 40 years ago.

[Back then, it was either punk or prog rock, you couldn't like both].


Anyway, what else is there to do, when one of your best friends loves it?

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