artnoiSep 1, 2025
This article is part of my audiophiles series of articles
I usually looks for these traits when labeling people as audiophiles. Self-proclaimed audiophiles or those participating on audiophile-centric webforums usually have very similar traits.
These traits are ranked by my own naivity score, i.e. the higher the score, the more stupid the audiophile is. If you have any of these traits, add their naivity score to the sum.
If the sum of the scores exceeds 3, then you’re incurable unless you’re really willing to go through the awakening and recovery process.
These fallacies are acceptable, as they are very related to human hearing which is quite domain-specific.
Underestimation or total disregard of treshold of hearing and room noise
Because high-fidelity audio gears produce near-identical sound (by definition), the differences or artifacts will be very quiet. To be able to hear those artifacts, you’ll need to hear all of the sound, including the quitest and loudest part of the audio. So you’ll have to crank up the volume.
Recall that music is usually listened at 70-85dB SPL (without regard to room noise), and that room noise is ~30dB. These numbers indicate that to be able to hear the audio equipment’s differences in a standard room, you will need to listen at around 30+80dB = 110dB. This is well beyond too loud, and will probably damage your hearing.
If they disregard the room noise and proceed to play music at 80dB, then they’ll only have 50dB SINAD over romm noise, thus they won’t hear any differences between 2 high fidelity audio devices.
Disregard of psychoacoustics and how the human perception works
They don’t care about biases from our brain when doing listening tests. This ignorance prevents them from looking at double blind listening tests as a requirement when evaluating audio devices.
Don’t understand the importance of volume-matching when doing comparisons
They don’t realize that pushing up the volume can change the sound signature heard at the eardrum and perceived by the brain. Due to our own ear’s frequency response, louder volume push the quieter sounds up to audible levels, resulting in more “open”, “airy”, “detailed”, and overall fuller sound.
They don’t even know the term volume matching, and never think about doing it when comparing 2 devices. This is where they could be exploited to snake oil salesmen selling amplifiers, or even DAC with high line level.
My own believe is that the lack of proper volume matching also led to many rigged double blind listening tests.
These traits are also acceptable, because audiophiles with these traits simply lacked deep technical knowledge that 99% of other people also don’t know about.
But because the audiophiles claim to be experts on audio, they shouldn’t be making these mistakes. Audio is literally their expensive “pride hobby” they already sank thousands into. In other words, they already spent a fortune on something they think they understand perfectly but in reality don’t understand at all.
This is why I’m less forgiving for these characteristics and will give them a score of 2.
Focus on gear as opposed to objective measurement
TLDR: they believe components all contribute to audible characteristics of their systems.
They also believe that they can indefinitely improve their system’s sound by adding better, more expensive hi-fi components into the system.
Audiophiles don’t care about the measurements or other objective evidence (the only numbers they care are those on the advertisements or marketing, e.g. DSD512, 24-bit audio, DAC chip marketing specs, or a supertweeter’s max range).
They only care about the existence stuff, who made the stuff, how much is the stuff, but without regard to how well the stuff is doing its job objectively.
They believe the more hi-fi components you add, the better the fidelity.
So you should be focusing on building up your system with new component, one by one, until it reaches god-tier. And if you have all of the components figured out already, the system can still be better, because you can always upgrade your existing components to better (read more expensive) ones.
Audiophiles will laugh in your face if you listen to your headphones directly from your phone, even if the hardware proves to be excellent in audio performance.
For example, let’s say we have a pair of high impedance earphones, like a pair of CIEM. Also let’s say that somehow, the iPhone dongle manages to drive the earphones loud enough at around 70% volume.
If you were me, you would stop caring about the equipment and keep using the dongle, which actually happens to be quite good (it has >100dB SINAD, low output impedance of 1 ohm, and its small and compact). If an audiophile sees you trying out the new hi-fi headphones with the Apple dongle, he would however think that you are a complete idiot for not using dedicated mobile DAC/AMP to drive those expensive headphones.
This actually happened to me when trying out CIEM universal demo pairs - the woman working at the audio shop laughed in my face for using the dongle to drive 6-driver CIEMs and even persuade me to buy other equipment before buying the expensive CIEMs. The shopkeeper insists that I should use their DAC/AMP to be able to properly evaluate the headphones.
Using stupid words to describe sounds
Audiophiles like to use vague words like “sweet”, “mellow”, “punchy”, “slow” to describe audio fidelity. This is actually funny, since these words are nowhere near universal.
A sweet sound may be defined by audiophile X as “a boost in upper midrange”, while audiophile Y says it’s like with X’s definition, but with “fuller”, “warmer” lower midrange. X’s definition may mean “piercing” for audiophile Z.
Wrong holistic approach
Audiophiles are like vintage wine connoisseurs in that they believe firmly that everything has some side effects on everything. And they are not wrong - our universe is a closed system, and every particle or wave inside of it interacts with each other.
Every cable will degrade signal, like how terroir will likely have some effects on the grapes. But are those effects enough to (1) produce audible differences, or (2) affect fruits enough to change their sugar and other compositions such that these changes can be tasted even after decades long after it’s brewed, bottled, and stored in some random places.
But what these 2 categories of people get wrong is their own ability to perceive these minute changes. Because they overestimate their superhuman perception, they will “maximize” every pathway of their system.
For audiophiles, they might buy very big and heavy turntables to minimize noise, or some complex cables that can recover data loss.
For wine lovers, they might want to spend thousands on a certain vintage wine based on terrior alone, without even asking about where and how it’s been kept after all these decades, which should in theory have more effects on final taste.
Buy expensive analog cables, for sound
Some people understand that signals degrade in transmission. They also know that silver is a better conductor. But they don’t know how tiny or audible the degradation is, so they’ll buy expensive analog signal cables.
It’s totally okay to buy expensive analog cables for build quality and proper engineering. Cable and charisteristics like wire gauge, shielding, or even good connectors are totally valid points when buying expensive cables.
But buying Super-Kryo™ Gold-Silver-Copper Fibonacci+™ with quantum magnetic shield sleeve is totally idiotic. They usually find “silver” cable to be brighter sounding (which implies loss of bass and/or elevated highs).
Completely false understanding of digital audio
Examples of this include keywords like stair steps in PCM, or how jitter manifests itself in the output.
This led them to have bias that “better digital” = “more clarity but less smoothness” or something along that line.
They will also almost always prefer higher bit depth and sampling rate, not knowing about how dynamic range works post-mastering.
Don’t understand basic technical details of the world (building electrical wiring, digital signal, software)
This is usually not a problem, but would be one if the person making some big technical claim claim lacks the qualification to do so in the first place.
Folks like this will pay for expensive audiophile SD cards, and power and ground their own listening room separately from the rest of the house.
These traits are getting more dangerous, as they begin to play with sense of exclusivity and superiority. These traits also exhibit cult-like thinking, which is what’s behind audiophile thinking and validation process.
Think of themselves as the enlightened few
This superiority complex attitude is frequently seen online. A self-proclaimed audiophile claims to have golden ears and that he could hear the difference between two 0.5-meter USB cables is not hard to come by.
Some even claim they could hear the sound signature change after swapping one big capacitor inside his amplifier. They even think their hearing got better as they gain more experience, and completely disregard the age-related hearing loss. They may even say hearing loss has effects on their golden ears, because music is not just frequencies.
They believe themselves to be in an exclusive group of humans who have exceptional hearing ability, and taste in their audio equipment. Only words from these groups matter when it comes to audio, since other people lack the expertise and experience to talk about audio. Even audio engineers are shunned.
Some of these audiophiles might even know some basic niche science, like signal processing and physics. They also know enough about computer networking (and OS sound mixer). This is why you could see audiophile forums talking about low-pass filters in DACS, aliasing, output impedance, and all that nerdy stuff. Normal people will see this and immediately trust the audiophiles for their credibility and opinions.
Arguing with these smart ass audiophiles is very tiring, since they’ll keep throwing psedoscience claims at you. You will then have to scientifically disprove all of their claims. Sometimes, their claims are even right, but do not matter in the real world.
Even actual audio engineers won’t persuade them. Audiophiles believe mainstream audio engineers are only great at recording and mastering, but very bad at reproduction and playback. They will, however, listen to audio engineers working for hi-fi equipment manufacturers, though.
Ignoring room noise
Some audiophiles will chase “the quiet” with thousands of dollars in cables, amplifiers, power purifiers, and Quark room treatment stone. But they will rarely look into their own room noise and the room’s characteristics.
Instead of damping/treating the room, or getting quiter AC, they buy shit like this power conditioning box instead
Complete bullshit. Irrational thinking.
Overengineered but very old technology = more musical than modern solutions
Tube vs solid state, discrete components vs integrated circuit, class A amplifier vs other class, vinyls vs digital music, NOS DAC chip vs new one, WAV vs compressed flac, etc.
But there’re also times when newer technologies are loved by audiophiles. It’s when the new tech is very expensive, or is being marketed by audiophile-centric companies (like MQA, DSD, high-end digital cables, Roon)
Buy expensive power cables, outlets, or even dedicated audio ground in the dirt, for sound
Audiophiles believe that the electric power coming into their equipment must be very clean (devoid of mains noise), due to their simplistic “garbage in, garbage out” mindset.
So they spend thousands on a big ass power cable for their equipment, with golden plugs too.
When there’s nothing else to improve in the power department, they buy audiophile power outlets, and then power conditioner.
Care about marketing terms or trademarks
Monkeys see trademarks, monkeys map the name to sound signature 1-1.
For example, they see THX AAA, they jump to the conclusion that the sound will be dry. They see some Cardas trademark, the know the cable will lack the top-end but overall will sound very pleasant. They see MQA, they’ll say the audio sounds more pleasant than a flac of the same master.
Buy expensive digital audio cables, for sound
Because they believe that digital signal may degrade audibly, they will ensure that the digital connection is bit-perfect all the time. They’ll buy expensive USB cables.
Some are smart enough to know that the USB audio data is transmitted losslessly, but worry about timing error which will contribute to jitter, and will affect the analog output.
Sure a slow/faulty USB cable might drop some packets, but a well-engineered (i.e. normal) USB DAC should be able to handle this and push the jitter artifacts down to inaudible levels.
Digital shit only breaks when the equipment designers are truly incompetent or actively trying to make shit, like with AudioGD products here and here.
Buy expensive computer networking equipment, for sound
Like with digital audio cables, but way way worse because they don’t even trust computer networking. They buy Hi-Fi network switches, Ethernet cables to improve sound. Their argument is usually cheapo normie networking cables will lose data, causing retransmission and jitter.
They forgot that they can just buy faster cable to stream their 700kbps audio if transmission speed was their concern. They also forgot that if networking cables do lose so much data that the digital audio pipeline produced audible jitter, then the world would cromble down years ago due to more serious problems arising from “bad” networking, like, a lot of things.
Shape, look, and feel of object somehow reflects its sound signature
If the object is lightweight, then it might lack “power” or “punch”.
The smaller the cable, the thinnier or even tinnier the sound.
If copper, then would sound signature bassy
I think Cardas and hi-fi consumer speaker makers have done a good job exploiting this fallacy.