Were you an audiophile in the 1980s and 1990s?

@bdp24 100% I even built a custom designed dedicated listening room using J.Gordon Holt article on wall construction using activated carbon filtering for bass. He was a visionary beyond all other writers.

As to being an audiophile in the 80s and 90s, I may have been but was unable to execute sound quality commensurate with my desires until the 2000s due to financial constraints. The best thing I owned was a highly modified SME IV arm, then a VPI 19-4 table. I don’t consider my ML Monolith 3s as very good. I did own AR SP14 with an AR Classic 60 amp in the 90s but had typical bad cabling so that ruined the sound quality.

"What I DID say was that metric can not be used when the source material used in the evaluation of components is not a recording made with the intention of capturing "the sound of unamplified instruments in a real space", but is instead a recording made to merely sound "good". What does "good" mean? In the world of Pop music recording, if you think good means "the sound of unamplified instruments in a real space", well then you obviously haven’t spent much time in a recording studio." 

As a partime amateur recording engineer of 200+ performances at Disney Hall, Royce Hall, Ford Theater, etc. and many remastering engineer friends well known to the audiophile community, you are absolutely correct.  While I may have made many true to life recordings, with 48,000+ LPs/CD/78s/R2R, most of my recordings were "manufactured" to capture studio "performances for home (or inferior car/portable player) listening.  It is an entirely different experience than listening to live music (I share Holt's preference for classical although my collection includes a vast amount of jazz, opera, pop, rock to 1990 and ethnic).  I've also appraised 17 SoCal sound studios (and made a few recordings as well) and know something about creating a final listening product.  

An aside as to typical example of a bad reviewer. Robert Harley reviewed a Counterpoint 400? amp. He gave it a negative review indicating that the sound was problematic and told the manufacturer that it could be defective. They asked for it back, told him that they repaired the problem (did NOTHING) and sent it back to him. He re-reviewed it and stated it was so much improved and sounded great now that it was repaired. Typical foolish reviewer.  P.S. I purchased a highly modified version of that amp and it was good at the time but I only kept it for less than a year.  See next post.

I also greatly enjoyed Art Dudley's reviews on Listener and later pubs.  He introduced me to EAR (I own the 890, 864, 324 and used/sold the Acute for 15 years).  However, I did not use the 890 and 864 for more than a year back in 2006 as it was inferior to my new monoblock tube amps and subminiature preamp.  Then in 2022, I installed Synergistic Research purple fuse in the 890 and blue fuse in the 864, put Ultra SS Stillpoints under the 864 and SR MigSx under the 890-transformed my system into high end (good became great without SOTA cost).  I don't know how Art (and others) decided that the EAR equipment was so great using stock tubes, standard glass fuses and listening on their small rubber feet.  The 864 was given so-so initial reviews which I can verify as being accurate (forward sounding/in your face, lacking depth/flat soundstage).  Also, changing to NOS tubes (Mullard 4004/RCA cleartop 12AU7 line stage) were essential to elevating the 864 as well.  Too bad I couldn't share my enthusiasm with Art for the EAR gear sooner.