How much does it cost to be an audiophile?

A $4000 placebo effect is often worth it.

I think that's something that's misunderstood by a lot of people. When actively listening to music without other distractions, the distortion in low-end systems becomes very apparent and detracts from the experience.

When listening to music in the background and while doing other things (cleaning the house, cooking, driving, socializing with others, working out at the gym, etc), distortion is easily lost in other background noises (and you're not paying as much attention to it anyway). For a lot of people, I think this is the only way they ever listen to music, and so it's understandable why they wouldn't see the value in higher quality components.

For someone like yourself, who will actively listen to music without other distractions, it makes sense to spend a few thousand dollars for a better experience. With more expensive systems, I think you start to see diminishing returns. (But I'm not as dismissive as other commenters in saying that there's no difference.)

If working in the audio industry and studying the topic at university has taught me anything about audiophilia, then that would be the fact that audiophiles tend to fail to take room acoustics seriously.

Realistically, any half decent source and amplifier will introduce practically no distortion compared to what the combination of the speaker (and placement) and the listening room introduce. The only thing that makes loudspeakers viable really is our uncanny ability to make sense of room acoustical distortions. Thus, we can sense the true sound even though it has been mangled by echos, reverberations and room modes.

However, we can still hear the distortion--and much more so than the comparatively small distortions introduced by sources, amplifiers or cables.

The thing is, if you really want some stellar sound from your home stereo, it does not make much sense to spend more than a couple thousand bucks on audio equipment without significantly improving your room acoustics. A $1000 sound system in a good room will always outperform any system in a bad room. So if you really want to improve your sound, you should probably look into room acoustical measures.

I have heard some > $40k sound systems in purpose-built rooms. The result is really amazing. If you close your eyes, even a trained ear will have difficulties discerning the recording from the original. In one recording studio, they had a $100k sound system. However, they also had a room to match it: The room was physically decoupled from the outside world (the whole room was standing on rubber feet, so to speak), it had special double windows, a purpose-built air conditioning and above all, loads of sound absorbing material and architecture.

And frankly, if you really are serious about sound quality, this is the kind of effort you have to make in order to get there. Spending the same money on more expensive speakers won't help.

The premise of "perfect sound" is almost antithetical to the current state of the audiophile world. Some of the most expensive, well reviewed "audiophile" systems have worse specs than your run of the mill, mid-fi system. Heck, look at the obsession with vinyl, no matter which way you look at it, no matter how much superstition you have, the simple fact is that it has poorer fidelity than a CD. That "magic" quality that makes vinyl sound better than digital? Distortion. Albeit a quite pleasing distortion, but a distortion non the less. Plain and simple.

The world of audiophile gear is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. The human ear, just like the human eye, is.. well, rather poor. We have a very small spectrum in which we operate. So these magazines like stereophile will plop an osciliscope onto the latest piece of gear and marvel over the fact that it's flat from 0 to a kazillion and then talk about its "creamy, refined mids." Someone please kill me.

Audiophile USB cables, audiophile mode-correcting rocks, audiophile amps with .00000000000001% THD, that damn marker to color your CDs with? All hooey. I once read in a forum an anecdote about a guy switching from Monster, to some other overpriced cable and being able to tell the difference from a room away. This was not a tongue in cheek post.

The big problem is that this stuff is eerily close to religion. A bulk of the hard-core, $7000 CD player audiophiles I know are actually rather well educated -- engineers of one type or another, but they slip into cognitive dissonance when it comes to anything relating to audio. A phrase uttered far too frequently is "You can't measure what I'm hearing." Once that mindset is adopted, confirmation bias is king. Here's a $4k pear audio cable. It'll increase the air in the high end by around 15%.

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/audio-designline-bl...

Well, the xfeed filter is really only trying to mimick the way the far ear can hear more energy from a speaker at frequencies low enough that the head doesn't shadow it. So it doesn't need to be a particularly complex filter. Trying to make the correction curve too detailed will likely just result in clearly heard artifacts.