Are you an audiophile?

I'd say that I'm an audiophile, or at least I'm excessively picky about audio quality. ^^ At the very least, I can tell the difference between 128KBPS Xing-encoded MP3s and 256KBPS AAC or Musepack or whatever quite clearly, and I've spend a lot of time and money researching, buying, and occasionally restoring sound equipment, though I'd rather spend my time and money buying lots and lots of CDs and records. <3

On the other hand, I really think that a lot of people who claim to be audiophiles are just big fans of conspicuous spending. I can easily see a fairly wealthy person paying up for custom-molded in-ear headphones or flat speakers the size of a fairly large person, but do €500/meter power cables, Tiptoes for anything other than turntables, or even some particularly high-end sound equipment (big monoblocks or SET tube amps, anyone?) really improve anyone's listening experience at all, let alone to a degree that justifies their cost? Audiophilia is about music, not about HEY GUYS LOOK AT MY STACKED MERIDIAN MONOBLOCK BIWIRE HOSPITAL-GRADE POWER CABLES. :\

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Originally Posted by www.sega.co.jp

This poses an interesting question: what format do you use? I have heard that Ogg Vorbis can have the same quality as mp3s at bitrates 25-50% lower than the mp3.

Ogg is much better than MP3 at low bitrates, but it's not so good at higher rates. I actually think that MP3 gives better quality above around 192KBPS or so, though I wouldn't swear by it.

I personally encode all of my own music as 256KBPS AAC using everyone's least favourite program iTunes...it's as good as lossless on both my headphones and speakers, and works on my iPod (not the audiophile choice, I know) without any transcoding. ^^

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Originally Posted by Retriever II

No. My audio setup is a $15 pair of Koss headphones from Walmart. I can tell the difference between a good recording and a bad one, but if you take the good recoding and encode it at 128 and 320, I'm not going to tell any difference.

Actually, some of those cheap Koss KSC series headphones are very musical. They aren't very detailed and don't have very good soundstaging, but they're really good for non-critical listening. If you can't find Sennheiser PX100s or AKG K26s locally, they're probably the best thing you can buy while sparing your wallet.

just don't buy new ones from wal-mart, since they're evil. o_o

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Originally Posted by Trigunnerz

Just because of sound quality, you hate some of the songs? Isn't the content more important? You guys must hate any old recordings of great artists then.

It's more of a matter of achieving the best possible playback of a given song IMHO...though, unfortunately, there are quite a few "audiophiles" (not very good ones, really) who seem to buy music to listen to their sound systems, not the other way around. -_-

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Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

Maybe everyone posting here should add what kind of audio setup they have a home or the place they're posting from. Because at least I think that most of you simply can't be audiophile because lacking a decent audio setup.

I'm of the very strong opinion that you're doing something wrong if you spend more money on your sound system than on your music collection.

I personally use the headphone output of an iPod nano or my laptop to run a pair of Etymotic ER-6's, or the line-out of an iPod dock and a 60 watt Technics SA-626 receiver to run a rebuilt pair of Yamaha NS-690 speakers. I occasionally run a cheap Technics turntable with a Grado Black cartridge, though I've never really caught the appeal of vinyl. I think that I paid maybe $500 for the whole system, and half of that was the cost of my iPod, plus $100 to buy the speakers and get them refoamed and rebuilt. :\

At one time, I used AKG K501 headphones with a MINT amplifier, an X-Fi sound card, and a Sansui 9090DB receiver, but all of those parts have been sold except for the headphones, which I swapped for my current ER-6's. I honestly didn't find that they truly improved my listening experience compared to the simple system that I'm using now. Maybe in another hundred CD's, I'll buy another 9090DB (or, better yet, a CR-2020 or another suitably beefy old Yamaha receiver) and a set of Magnepans. ^_^

Oh, and I think I said it before in this thread, but I use 256KBPS AAC as my standard archive format, and I try to download music in APS VBR or better. That said, I have bought quite a bit of stuff off of the iTunes Music Store (128K AAC), and I don't find it to sound that bad. :\

I was speaking idiomatically.