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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

I certainly am.

But I can also believe that it is at least somewhat different for audiophiles. I once took a beer judge certification course, and, by the end of it, I could easily distinguish flavor subtleties that were completely imperceptible to me at the start of the class. Not just in a "I think I can" way, but reliably in blind tests. And I've had a similar experience of imperceptible differences becoming easy to spot when learning to speak new languages. So it seems possible to me that simply being an audiophile makes it possible to care about subtleties that non-audiophiles can't even hear, because brains are magical like that.

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For me it took getting some good balanced armature IEMs and lying somewhere calm and quiet with a 24-slider EQ and listening repeatedly to familiar music with different EQ adjustments. Play a song. Move one or two sliders. Play it again. You pick up on a lot of subtleties you’d miss otherwise.

The crucial difference is that compared to our other senses, our ears are really, really, astonishingly shit. They can be highly precise in one context and ludicrously imprecise in another context. And they lie. They often tell us we're hearing what our eyes expect to hear.

OTOH, there aren't many other sensory systems that operate over 3 orders of magnitude in frequency and 6 o.o.m. in amplitude.

This is true. Our hearing is well tuned for utility in a pre-modern context. They just don't have anything remotely like the precision of our eyesight, which can judge things like the straightness of a line, or simultaneously compare the properties of distinct objects.

There was a famous (in the diy audio community at least) blind test where music was played in audiophile equipment with some premium audio cable that cost a lot, and then the same music was played with a bent coathanger used as a cable. The order was randomized, and the audiophiles couldn't tell the difference. There have been other blind tests with different equipment, like hi end amplifiers vs mid-level consumer grade equipment (like your average Sony) with same results. You can search audio forums for the details. From all that I've read over the years, and from my own experience of quite a few years listening to the best recorded classical music, pretty much every good consumer player, amplifier, dac today is good enough for every audiophile. Where you'll find the difference is in the speakers, and to a lesser extent, headphones.

TL;DR: If I had 5,000 dollars to spend on high end audio equipment for my living room, I'd spend 3,500-4,000 on the speakers. But I wouldn't, personally. I'd spend half of that and get 98% of the quality.

I think there is varying degrees of craziness with audiophiles and then they all get lumped together making them look worse.

For example you have the Japanese audiophiles spending 100,000 on speakers but live in a 10x10 room, or install power lines as they say they can hear the difference.

Audio reaches diminishing returns pretty quickly, you aren't going to see massive audio gains by upping your budget from $2,000 to $20,000 but you will by going from $200 to $2,000. At a certain point you are paying for a sound curve that suits you over the end all be all music reproduction.

A lot of stuff is getting cheaper too with good class D amplifiers with very low distortion being available to DIY and custom builders for relatively cheap (as long as you aren't in the class D is garbage audiophile crowd, which I think is similar to the my $1,000 dollar wire is better than your $50 dollar wires).

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