I think it is rather naive view. Audio market is an industry with professionals.
You can buy spare parts for 30-years old studio headphones. Apple with their "no repair allowed" business model and 500ms latency is a joke.
You can buy spare parts for 30-years old studio headphones. Apple with their "no repair allowed" business model and 500ms latency is a joke.
Not great, but should allow phone conversations without too much fatigue.
Back to holding my phone against my face, I guess.
What about using wired earbuds with a Lightning dongle? That should give low latency, right?
The audiophiles don't like music and don't make money from their equipment, they simply obsess with it. They are like those camera nerds talking about the sensors, color science and so on but are not actually into photography. The professional photographers simply use the equipment for the task and the people who love photography don't obsess with the camera. Same thing with the audio.
These are not incompatible pursuits. In fact, they pair rather nicely.
As a kid I was amazed by music on the cheap radio we had. And then when I listened on headphones, it was a whole other world full of details I couldn't hear on the cheap radio speaker. And it made me fall in love with music even more.
As an adult I spend a few years learning about the gear and making various purchases, even building my own speakers from kits. Did I like tinkering with the gear? Yeah, that was kind of fun, but it was largely a means to an end, which was the music.
The unfortunate fact is that music lovers who don't think about the gear are getting a crappy version of the music. If you know what you're doing, you can get some pretty world-class sound for well under a grand or even a few hundred bucks. If not, you get a Bluetooth speaker for the same amount of money that sounds like garbage and sucks the life out of your music.
You can still enjoy music that way! Many do! I sure can! But it's like wandering through the Louvre with filthy, smudged glasses. If you really like the art, it's worthwhile to clean those things off so you can really see what you're looking at.
There definitely an element of being a gearhead, but I just really love music, and want to listen to it in the most accurate way possible.
> The audiophiles don't like music That is a pretty bold claim to make with such confidence about a massive and diverse group of people whose name literally means lover of audio.
What does it even supposed to mean?
but I have a hunch that people like me are the
(largely) silent majority.
> hat-makers
Surely you mean haberdashers--they're ground floor! (Thank you, Coil, for Going Up.)
For an "audiophile" AirPods are ripoff similar to CD demagnetizer.