Top Ten "Definitions of an Audiophile"

Cd318 , well there’s a load of underperforming mediocre components at all price points however for those whom cannot hear the difference from a well designed great performing component’s can easily end up with a lifeless sounding system .
if you pick components simply because they are class A awarded with a popular online following could be your first mistake.

An audiophile has an addictive personality, seeking that higher high when tolerance kicks in.  

@in_shore ,

“Audiophile’s”.... A group of people belonging to a niche hobby which whom many are easily manipulated into believing the more expensive said product’s are the better the performance."


Easily done by continuously denigrating measurements and trying to suppress any evidence which contradicts the above claim.

For example, can it really be true that the cheapest CD player can sound alarmingly close to the most expensive one?

Ditto for cables, DACs, and integrated amplifiers...

Evidence to the contrary, outside hearsay, is practically non-existant. 

For sure many of us have been easily manipulated because we tend to lose our heads in our desperation to find audio nirvana.

What to do?

Music for many is the most compelling, most thrilling, and most unifying (least damaging) way of mood alteration - ok, there might be one other even greater - but nevertheless it easily becomes an obsession we have no wish to be freed from.

We shouldn’t mock our fellow audiophiles for their gullibility too much. After all, how many of us can say we weren’t taken in by the hype at some point? If only forums such as these had existed when I first got into audio.

If somehow, somewhere you are reading this Neil, then I’d like to say bless you and thanks for introducing me to the enticing world of Hi-Fi.

I’ll never forget those days of Marylebone Road 1984.

“Audiophile’s”.... A group of people belonging to a niche hobby which whom many are easily manipulated into believing the more expensive said product’s are the better the performance .

An audiophile is like a modern day explorer or climber but with all the action and melodrama internalised inside their head.

Outsiders often have little or no idea of what's happening in there, or why it even matters.

An audiophile is someone who insists upon pissing against the wind, hoping one day for vindication by a dramatic change in the wind direction.

I'm still waiting, I'm still hoping..

The joyful pursuit of orchestrating just the right balance of components in the expectation of providing a balanced reasonable facsimile of a performance.

Hmmm. I’m an audiot.  Fortunately I’ve stopped chasing the dragon ever since 2018 kicked my financial ass. 



I’ve been fortunate to be on the rebound, and I’ve gathered together a modest system that pretty much delivers everything I had in the past, albeit sans want of something else. I learnt. 

Audiophile: One who has extensive vinyl and CD collections with superb source playback, but relies exclusively on streaming.

An audiophile is like a wine taster who despite regularly attending festivals (and having a fetish for collecting bottles and labels) rarely drinks for pleasure.

Anyone who has spent more on his system than on his (or her. Yeah, right ;-) music library. I would say collection, but that term now seems to me to have negative connotations. Like buying an LP just to own it, rather than to listen to.

He is not an audiophile! He looks kind of content & isn't holding the speaker right. Also, there isn't one spec of diamond dust on either of the drivers or the tweeter. 

Dunno but here is a rare actual photo of one:

https://hometheaterreview.com/do-you-need-to-love-music-to-be-a-true-audiophile/

Enjoys both the music and gear that makes it happen. 

Audiophile: A lover of audio equipment who has more dollars than sense.

Audiophile: one who professes to love the sound of music, yet never is able to relax and enjoy it due to constantly being obsessively distracted by innumerable sonic details that never are quite right, or even if they are then the meter says they aren’t, or even if the meter says they are then the graph says they aren’t, or even if the graph says all’s well some reviewer somewhere says oh the Symphonic Bombast is so much better, or even if all the reviewers everywhere say your exact system is the best there can possibly be even that doesn’t matter because some know it all boob somewhere on the internet says what are you nuts wire direction can’t possibly matter and by the way your speakers absolutely positively must be line array electrostatic pure crystal piezo quantum time aligned, and I have the degree from Starfleet to prove it, and so away you go fussing and futzing and racking up the credit card to the point your retirement and even the roof over your head is at risk and the one thing you can never ever do is enjoy the music because you are not a music lover- yet even that is something you can argue about endlessly - because you are an audiophile. See also audiophilia nervosa.

Audiophile: "One who cannot understand why they are fascinated by overpriced boxes of wires"(one should not confuse the term "Audiophile" with the term "Audiofool" or "Audionut".
Audiofool: "One who cannot stop buying different boxes of wires with expectations that the most recent box will sound superior to the previous boxes"
Audionut: "One who hoards different boxes of wires (much like a squirrel stores nuts in the ground at different locations) with the intention of digging them out when an appetite has been felt"
Note: The term "Audiophile" is often misspoken when one means to say "music lover". A music lover is a "Melophile" not an "Audiophile". It is very rare that a person is both a melophile and an audiophile and it has not occured since the 1780s when Luigi Galvani first observed the effect of static electricity in causing the legs of a frog to twitch, and observed the same effect produced just due to certain metallic contacts with the frog involving a complete circuit. Luigi was known to his friends to connect wires to frogs and he loved listening to music.

"Close enough"... Now that is a good one! Decent definition though :-)