Most of the reviews i read seem to be just advertorials, or worse, some kid who thinks they know it all using ridiculous terms they think sound cool. To be fair, that’s with all products these days. It’s all marketing.
Independent reviewers are hard to find and even then, they can never be as good as the people who post about their actual ownership experience over time. That’s the power of the internet. Many perspectives can be seen from real world people, rather than having to listen to a paid or biased journalist.
Watch out. An audiophile will be along shortly to assert how wrong you are. You must not have experienced top notch, sufficiently expensive equipment. Or your listening skills just are not up to snuff.
My theory is that contemporary audiophiles are a secretly bored, dissatisfied lot. Recorded music, by its very nature, is simulacra. And though audiophiles externally may wax poetic about how resolving and involving their systems are, they subliminally find their experiences lacking. More than this, there must be something more than this. Everything matters. If only I do this or that. Thus, they invent problems and solutions to continue that never ending pursuit of nothingness.
“Endless” might have a limited lifespan. Note what a huge percentage of inveterate audiophiles and holders of the jobs they “create” are 55+ year old men.
Well, right. I’ve noticed when a friend and I visited a jazz (of course) concert organised by a local hifi dealer in autumn. Being in the mid-forties we were already the exception there, only a handful of the 100 or so visitors were younger than us. It didn’t really made me feel young though.
Since the quest cannot really reach its goal (a beauty of its own, at least for those with the jobs) wouldn’t it have to be called an endless one? Of course individuals might have to give up now and then …
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
29
But there’s a new cadre of 55+ year old men every year. Could just be a factor of being old enough to have accumulated enough capital to spend it on this expensive hobby. Or old enough to have paid off the mortgage and put the kids through college, and now have some spare cash flow.
Your reasoning does not fit reality – because the logic here is not biconditional.
If audiophile, then generally 55+ year old man.
Yup.
If 55+ year old man, then generally audiophile.
Nope.
Audiophile demographic pyramid is tipping older. Audiophiles are not being replaced as rapidly as they are dying off.
AJ
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
31
Not what I was hypothesizing, though. I guess what I was hypothesizing was that an obvious correlation between today’s 55+ men and today’s audiophiles does not imply that tomorrow’s audiphiles must consist of today’s audiophiles, but may in fact simply consist of tomorrow’s financially well-off.
I hate to see the word audiophile used to describe a specific subset of music lovers who obsess more than some others about the hardware as if it were a particularly bad thing. The reality is the hifi industry couldn’t survive without them. Don’t knock them, thank them!
I think audiophile more often than not is used to describe someone who uses music to listen to their equipment. I certainly don’t read “music lover” when I see it. It’s been kidnapped much in the way the word “hacker” has.
He refused to review the Hifiberry DAC+ until he changed the power supply and suddenly had a religious experience and reviewed it. True story. Basically Darko with a flair for the dramatic. Maybe he should use the measuring equipment in the background?
So @Amir_Majidimehr based on your measurements, do streamers matter? or does it vary by the DAC they feed?
In other words, if in theory the DAC was great, with all the input isolation and such, does it matter if one streams using a Chromecast Audio, or a $2,500 standalone streamer?
