You know you have audiophile system when...

too bad for you since jackhifiguy and others did not respond to the question which was how you know if you have an audiophile system, not whether you're an audiophile or the definition thereof.

I liked mikeydee's answer best for humor or maybe arcam88's although i can listen for hours and smile on the road with just a car stereo.

Now you've got me curious about the cables--interconnect or speaker and brand?

My feeling that i had achieved an "audiophile system" was when i invested enough to have constant "wow" moments of "they are here" or "i am there" on live recordings (esp acoustic) and even studio recordings where the engineers attempted to achieve that with the miking and instrument placement.  I wish that could have been achieved with cables only but it required a more significant investment in every category: amplification, speakers, DAC, turntable/tonearm/cart--but other than [possibly] cable tweaks or tonearm/cartridge upgrades i'm done---probably, maybe...

that's probably a fair statement for many audiophiles--but hopefully their goal would be to make music sound, well, more musical ?  It's certainly why i focus almost exclusively on live recordings these days and i'm pretty satisfied with the sound...well, almost, maybe...

@mceljo thanks for the info--i've been using AQ's Red River IC's for Pre to DAC--which appear to be almost the same cost as Sydney -- i'll go to AQ's site to see what the differences are.  My amp came with a 10 awg PC so i haven't changed that out but it's not a huge cost to try yours so i may.  I've been thinking about trying Pangea's as well.

@tuberist --that's my standard as well and i feel like i'm there w/ my system--most of the time--ya never know exactly on amplified instruments b/c live you're hearing them through PA speakers so i use acoustic records to judge.

@mceljo thanks for that info--i was too lazy to ask AQ but it's interesting that they say triple is best for balanced (which is not what i do) and double is better for RCA; however, i agree with you that it's unlikely i'll hear any difference if i went to Sydney from Red River.

@mceljo Totally agree but that really hadn't occurred to me at the time b/c i bought the RR cables used for half price (never unboxed according to seller and i'm reasonably sure that was the case) so it didn't matter to me much--if i were buying AQ cables from scratch i would probably have gone with Big Sur or Sydney as i use single-ended for everything and price seems a good value for features.

@simonmoon Agree it's just fine and right in line with what you've said.  Broken down into its Latin and Greek roots audiophile simply means a "lover of sound"--doesn't mean " lover of sound equipment"...Although reasonably good equipment is generally necessary to make that sound as close to live as possible, being an audiophile does not mean you must own high-end gear.