The audiophile hobby is filled with people who are total musical and technological freaks. They spend large sums of money on both consumer electronics products as well as physical media be it vinyl records, Compact Discs, SACDs, reel to reel tapes, HD downloads, HD streaming and more.
Five Reasons Why Audiophiles Are Technological Extremists
- Audiophiles Tend to Be Messy. These Baby Boomer hobbyists tend to not keep the most clean rooms for their audiophile listening environments. They aren’t dirty per se as much as they are messy. Insanely expensive cables are strewn everywhere. Amps are on the floor. Acoustical treatments are glued to the walls and ceiling. Seating options are not designed for guests – just one listener.
- The cost of owning an audiophile system is less than a Ferrari (in many cases). It isn’t rare to see audiophile loudspeakers that cost $30,000, $50,000, $100,000 or even $500,000 per pair. And that’s just for speakers. There is a Spanish audiophile company that makes a $250,000 CD player and streamer. That’s not a typo. Cables can cost $35,000 per pair of speaker cables or $40,000 for a power chord. Real world people think that this is PURELY INSANE.
- Performance Returns Are Minimal After a Certain Point. The Audiophile hobby is about chasing the Nth degree of performance and after a certain level of performance these folks are chasing exotica and extreme technologies over scientifically proven audio gains. And that doesn’t stop them from chasing that buzz. They keep chasing the dragon despite the cost.
- The Audiophile Hobby Is a Solo Event. Few audiophiles listen together. The hobby tends to be about creating a system that is perfectly blended for your tastes and hearing. Men lose their hearing as they age by nature. They craft the bespoke sound of their system to their specific hearing. Other younger audiophiles who might have more hearing range left, might not like how bright an old guy system sounds and vice et versa.
- Tweaks in the Audiophile World Can Be Absurd. For example, painting the edges of your Compact Discs with permeant green paint to block light leakage out the side of a CD is one. Placing random wooden blocks in your listening room (Mpingo discs as they are known) is another. Propping your speaker cables up on little saw horses, is another one. People actually do this stuff.
Ask 1,000 people at The Mall of the Americas if this is odd or freak-ish behavior and you will get 975 plus people to say yes. For those who love the hobby – they don’t feel that way and they spend their time, effort and tons of money to keep going to build the best possible audiophile music playback system that they can afford. God love them for that.