Whenever I think of audiophiles, I imagine a couple of wealthy successful older men hanging out on a weekend. While the wives are elsewhere talking about the latest vacation or whatever, they need something to talk about.

Because they're the kind of men who love maximizing making numbers go up, it needs to have something to do with optimizing performance. Because they're wealthy and their success is a big part of their identity, it needs to be something expensive.

Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem.

The actual problem is self is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.

See also:

* Car tuning

* JavaScript front-end frameworks

* Barbeque

* Linux distros

* Cycling

* Optimizing passenger flying experience