My real hobby, somewhere in there ...

This guy is so misinformed & ready to make a buck from anything. I've known of him for years & he always seems to only half get it & the reason is obvious.


Quoted from silly article.......There's nothing wrong with owning the finest equipment or a $25,000 speaker cable, but all the professional musicians I know have none of this. More important are good recordings of great performances, great speakers, careful placement and good home acoustics. We know domestic sound reproduction is never going be perfect, so we just get close enough, get over it, and enjoy the music, letting our imaginations fill in the difference for us since we're intimately familiar with live performances. We listen to the music, not the gear. The only big-name musicians I've seen pitching audio equipment are those who are paid for their endorsements.
A music lover spends more time at live performances, either as audience or as performer, than pretending to reproduce it at home.

Seriously, so musicians & the like don't listen to too much music at home huh! And none of them endorse the best equipment they've heard for reproduction huh? Spend all your time at live concerts etc, yeah right, his last name is not referred to Rollwell for nothing...

Maybe he should donate here!!!!!​
 
NorthStar said:
What is an Audiophile?
Click to expand...

I think it is an interesting and provocative article, contrary to sharkmouth. That's not to say I agree with everything said by the author.

Some of his observations correspond to my own belief the heyday of "high-fidelity" as a popular phenomenon was the 1970s. That was the era of those fabulous "silver" monstrosities. More particularly it was the era when there were stereo shops on every street corner and everybody had to have stereo system, (say a Pioneer receiver, Technics turntable with Shure cartridge, and Advent speaker; personally I was alive, well, and listening to separates.) The age effectively ended with emergence of the VCR at which time much of the popular imagination shifted to video from sound.

I find this paragraph amusing -- though I'm sure it offends a good many current-day, self-confessed audiophiles ...
Ken Rockwell said:
Audiophiles are what's left after udiophiles are what's left after almost all of the knowledgeable music and engineering people left the audio scene back in the 1980s. Audiophiles are non-technical, non-musical kooks who imagine the darnedestly stupid things about audio equipment. Audiophiles are fun to watch; they're just as confused at how audio equipment or music really works as primitive men like cargo cults are about airplanes. An audiophile will waste days comparing the sound of power cords or different kinds of solder, but won't even notice that his speakers are out-of-phase. An audiophile never enjoys music; he only listens to the sound of audio equipment.. Audiophiles are non-technical, non-musical kooks who imagine the darnedestly stupid things about audio equipment. Audiophiles are fun to watch; they're just as confused at how audio equipment or music really works as primitive men like cargo cults are about airplanes. An audiophile will waste days comparing the sound of power cords or different kinds of solder, but won't even notice that his speakers are out-of-phase. An audiophile never enjoys music; he only listens to the sound of audio equipment.
Click to expand...

... I especially like the "cargo cults" reference: hilarious.

I don't agree that "audiophiles are what's left after almost all of the knowledgeable music and engineering people left the audio scene". Who says, other than Rockwell, that most have left? Nonsense. On the other hand I do agree that there are 'way too many audiophiles who "imagine the darnedest stupid things".

More importantly, however, it's simply slanderous to say, "an audiophile almost never enjoys music, even if played on a $100,000 hi-fi". All audiophiles of my acquaintance are certainly music lovers too.

Finally and sadly I have to disagree that, "A music lover spends more time at live performances, either as audience or as performer, than pretending to reproduce it at home". Unfortunately it's far too common that undoubted music lovers don't have good access to live performance of the music the love for logistic and/or financial reasons.
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I think he generalized a bit too much. I am an Audiophile and love gear, but I don't have the money to keep buying it so I still use a setup from the 90s.
 
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