Audiophile

Warning! Audiophiles are everywhere. There may be one in your house RIGHT NOW!

An audiophile butt plug

$7250 Speaker cable. Only true audiophiles can tell the difference between these and $10 cables from Radio Shack.

Cho Seung-Hui before his headphones were stolen.

An audiophile is a person who is into otic sex, that is sex with ears. It comes from the Greek audios, sound, and philos, fucking. Audiophiles also will have sex with CDs and tie themselves up with speaker cable. Especially pretentious audiophiles will favor old vinyl records, saying they feel "warmer". When they can't get something on vinyl, they will attempt to run everything else through an expensive tube processor to make it sound "warmer".

An audiophile can be spotted by their habit of complaining about MP3s and using only FLAC, because the high frequency sounds that even your dog can't hear get stripped out in compression.

Audiophiles will often spend at least 100 dollars on gold speaker cable, because they think that the raw pretentiousness will make them have an audiorgasm. Sadly for them, there is no known mechanism that can make MCR sound any good. Audiophiles are all deaf, however, and as a result they can't actually tell the difference between those $5 earphones you bought at Go-Lo and $250 Sennheiser HD555s.

True audiophiles will spend $50,000 on designer hand-made speakers, $7,000 speaker cable, $10,000 in power filtering equipment and a $5,000 vinyl player, and still won't be able to tell the difference between it and a $500 system without lying through their teeth.

How to spot an Audiophile

• If outdoors (rare) will be wearing three sets of noise - canceling headphones, because one just doesn't cut it.
• Will have no money for little things like gas, food or clothes.
• Will have a 160GB iPod with only three songs on it, due to their compulsion to have everything completely uncompressed.
• Will probably be a Mac user.
• Will spend $120 on a Telefunken-branded triode when Sovtek sells the same damn tube for eight dollars, and will claim to be able to tell the difference.
• Will have the vast majority of their house (mortgaged) full of their sound system, which will sound shit because audiophiles all think that broken "classic" parts pwn modern things like 7:1 surround sound.
• Bought the 2009 Beatles Mono Box set, which somehow costs more than the stereo set.

See also: SHAKTI Stone

Trolling Audiophiles

• Alternatively, you can tell them that the high frequencies that they can't actually hear which are preserved in their favored music format, FLAC, could possibly cancel out some of the frequencies that they can hear. This will make them question everything they have ever known.

• Tell them you downloaded and listened to some MP3s the other day, and emphasize how great the music sounded. This will cause instant rage from an audiophile as they will go into an angry rant about how much better FLAC sounds and how with FLAC the bass sounds bassier, the highs higher, and the middles more middly, and other assorted bullshit.

• Tell them how awesome your speakers sound that you picked up at the thrift store for only $15 the other day.

• Ask what the difference between FLAC and MP3 is.

• Ask why FLAC files are so damn big.

• Ask them why anybody would want to use such an outdated format like vinyl when CDs are cheaper, portable, and much easier and cheaper to play back.

Audiophiles pwned for good

When actual case studies are done, it is conclusively shown that audiophiles are delusional idiots who waste massive amounts of money on equipment that gives them absolutely no real improvement in sound quality.

“	My brother, an audio engineering whiz kid has proven to me what is real and what is not. We gathered up 5 of our audio buddies. We took my "old" Martin Logan SL-3 (not a bad speaker for accurate noise making) and hooked them up with Monster 1000 speaker cables (decent cables according to the audio press). They were connected to an ABX switch box allowing blind fold testing. The music was played. Of the 5 blind folded, only 2 guessed correctly which was the monster cable. Keeping us blind folded, my brother switched out the Belden wire (are you ready for this) with simple coat hanger wire! After 5 tests, none could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire. Further, when music was played through the coat hanger wire, we were asked if what we heard sounded good to us. All agreed that what was heard sounded excellent.	„
—Dr. Bob Dean

Sauce

“	If you're in the business of selling high end audio then it becomes very important to discover to what extent the golden ears are or are not full of it. Bob Carver did a little hands on research at a mid '70s trade show to shed some light on these suspicions. He displayed an impressive system openly. I don't recall the model number but it had the separate tube amps for the right and left channel. It had the oxygen free gold wire to interconnect the type of components that ultra audiophiles have wet dreams about: hand crafted capacitors and resistors and transistors matched to six 9s precision in gain and so on and so forth. In any case the system displayed was in the $30k range at the time. The speakers were no less expensive and no doubt exquisitely hand matched to the amps. But here is where the joke comes in. The speakers were connected to a $200 dollar range bookshelf stereo hidden behind a curtain. Carver injected pink noise into the ultra stereo and displayed the result on a spectrum analyzer. He then set the bookshelf system to a moderate volume and EQed it with the same pink noise as input until it matched the spectrum of the ultra stereo. As long as the controls on the bookshelf were not tampered with, it's sound was good approximation of the ultra stereo at the same moderate volume. He told the audience that he had a top secret experimental system behind the curtain and wanted to field test it to ensure he was on the right track. With some audiophile grade vinyl classical as the input he switched between the ultra stereo (which they COULD see and were familiar with) and the "top secret" bookshelf system behind the curtain. Lo and behold! The bookshelf system had far better "aural spaciality.........." I've known salesmen who have done this same thing several times with the same result. I suppose this goes a long way toward explaining the audiophile aversion to double blinded A/B listening tests. Those A/B switches must introduce some truly horrible "multiphasic inhibited frequency shifts" into the signal.	„
—dmaxwell

Sauce

External Links

• http://www.audiophileusa.com/ - Rare and collectible records
• http://www.audioasylum.com/ - Assorted audio crap
• http://www.goatse.fr - Goatse
• P.W.B. Electronics - When audiophiles and hippy-mystics collide
• http://www.audiopligg.com/ - Full of sexy news for audiophiles.
• lolgirl.mp3 Serious Audiophile
• http://6moons.com/ - Reviews of overpriced audiophile hardware
• Audiokarma - An audiophile message board, RIPE FOR TROLLING

See Also

• FLAC - The audiophile's preferred music file format.
• Unwarranted Self-Importance
• Elitist
• Hipster
• What.CD
• Waffles.fm

Audiophile is part of a series on Music Visit the Music Portal for complete coverage.

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