Audiophiles Vs Music lovers

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#1 erstellt: 25. Mai 2006, 11:55

I know it is an oft repeated discussion but came across this in aht HFC forum.

Us and Them

The other day, over on rec.audio.classical.recordings, an interesting discussion arose about a misposted ad for a pair of used Monster Cable speaker wires. At $450, if you or I liked the sound of the cables, we might think it them bargain. However, the general opinion on the newsgroup was that $45, let alone $450, would be too much. Now, these are people who, in their own way, can be obsessive. They may own, say, $1000 worth of Beethoven symphonies, or every recording of Bruno Walter. Obsessive, yes. But what they are really obsessive about is listening to music. They listen to digital, to FM radio, to cassette tapes; why, I bet one or two of them even has an 8-track player. Many of them still have and use vinyl. Mind you, they don’t listen to vinyl because Michael Fremer told them to, or because of any supposed vinyl superiority. They do so simply because they own music on vinyl. Why do they do this? Because, most emphatically, they are music lovers. And with equal force, they are not audiophiles.

What!? There’s a difference? You bet.

After a decade or so as a serious audiophile, I have come to the conclusion, no news flash here, that audiophiles and music lovers are if not two different people, then two completely different and opposing roles. It seems to me that the role of the audiophile, if put into school-day terms, is akin to that of the grammar teacher. I’m sure you remember writing the world's best essay in school, full of unique and stimulating ideas for which you deserved praise and recognition. However, your mean ol’ grammar teacher completely failed to notice what was there, instead focusing not on what you said but how you said it. On the other hand, Bill Bifocal, who couldn’t come up with an original idea even if it meant sex with the entire swim team, got an A, all because he never, ever had a run-on sentence—and always used punctuation correctly, and knew that to horribly split an infinitive was to sin. In other words, he wrote like audiophile records sound.

The role of the music lover is more what you do when first learning a new language. As you listen to native speakers, you catch a word here, a phrase there, and fill in the gaps to extract the meaning. You listen to what you know, and then extrapolate the rest. In sports terms, the audiophile is like a G.M., who must look at what’s missing from the team in order to improve it, while the music lover is like a coach, who uses everything he has to win.

Further, I’ve come to the conclusion that until and unless audiophiles market and enthusiastically talk about affordable high-end products that make a real-world difference (that is, a difference that our online comrades over in rec.audio.classical.recordings or rec.music.bluenote can hear and appreciate as valuable), our little world will disappear. We will be tossed out with yesterday's news when DVD, multimedia and home theater finally converge. Once again, no news flash here. But unless we do this, other entertainment options will consume the young and impressionable, while the old and music-minded will fail to see why they should pay the entry price to play our game. So, you may ask, why bring this up now? Well, I’m looking for affordable gear that you and I can own and enjoy in both roles, audiophile and music lover, and I think I’ve found something that does just that.

Of course there can be people who are both and each one of us would be somewhere between the two. but the analogy on the grammar teacher was very interesting