Do you play?

I sing in a professional choir. I rarely go as a listener to a choral music concert. I usually only listen to recordings of choral music as a way to familiarize myself with the music. I also attend a lot of live concerts other than choral. This does not stop me from wanting great audio equipment. Where I feel I differ from most audiophiles, is I care almost entirely and exclusively how good the performance is. I could care less how good a recording sounds, if the performance is not as good as some other recording. I have good equipment because I want the recordings I do love to sound the best possible.

After working for about 20 years as a semi-professional drummer (mostly rock/pop), and "retired" about ten years ago, I still love music and have assembled a system which gets me as close as possible to recreating the emotion of a live event. My musical tastes have eveloved quite a bit from my playing days, I listen to jazz and classical mostly, rarely to rock - although rock/pop is the only thing I will listen to in my car. I still value the performance over sound, but, find that when listening at home, a poorly recorded piece gets too much in the way for me to really enjoy the music. Perhaps that is why I have gravitated away from listening to rock at home since great-sounding recordings are too rare. This same music on a less resolving system, however, (like in the car) can be very enjoyable. BTW - I feel that you can't generalize on the musician/audiophile issue. I know other musicians who are avid audiophiles and others who are perfectly happy listening via any means possible. I also know a number of audiophiles who are so much into the equipment that they would listen to anything (junk included) as long as it made their system sound good. Just my thoughts.

I got my college degree in music composition, and I do quite a bit of composing. I play a little bit of violin, piano and guitar--all quite poorly. I really got into hi-fi because of my schooling. I find that when one is listening to music for enjoyment AND to learn about composition and orchestration, there's so much more to learn and enjoy from a true hi-fi system. The audiophiles that I know tend to be both musicians and technophiles. I think that there's a dual obsession with both music and state-of-the-art technology in these folks. I know that I've always been that way.

I consider some friends who are heavy into Home Theater to be Videophiles.

I played the string bass until I was 16 and I made 4th chair in the Georgia all-state orchestra. I had to fake it much of the time. All timber and no speed. Had to retire, early. But the hair did stand up on the back of my neck playing with that level of musicians and conductor, and hey, we cut an albumn!