this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Audiophiles get a lot of shit outside their little online dens and it's always the same cable memes everywhere (that's not even the gear most people sell their kidneys for, afaik), but if you're one and you have a shred of self-awareness, this kinda makes ya laugh out loud.
When I was in high school, late 90s, I dated a chick whose mom worked in a bakery. She started work at like 2AM and for some reason I don't remember, my gf had to go there and she asked me to go with her...sure fuck it (we pretty much ran free back then, different time) and we went down there. About a half dozen middle-aged women making batter and dough and whatever they did and their boss, the bakery's owner.
He was in his early 40s, and was like the love child of David Lee Roth and Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons. Cargo shorts, dirty sneakers, Motley Crue tshirt with a blond curly mullet and an earring in one ear. For being 2 in the morning he was wide eyed and he practically exploded as soon as I walked in the door "HEY MAN HOWS IT GOING?! WELCOME TO MY BAKERY!! YOU LIKE MUSIC?! WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO YOU LIKE?! WANT TO SEE SOMETHING?!" I was honestly on the edge of fight or flight for a moment but despite the coke or just how fuckin excited he was to have a visitor, he seemed safe, so I was like "Yeah sure, what's up?"
Leads me back to the far corner of the bakery to his office. There are speakers fucking everywhere. In his office he has racks and racks of high end stereo equipment, and he immediately launches into all this technical detail about the setup that I'm just nodding through...."SO THE SIGNAL COMES DOWN HERE THROUGH THIS SPECIAL CABLES...100 BUCKS A FOOT BUT ITS SO WORTH IT...THIS TAKES THE SIGNAL AND MUXES IT WITH THE AMPLIFIER THAN PIPES IT TO THE FLUX CAPACITOR THEN..." and eventually he wraps up and says "CHECK THIS OUT!!!"
Pulls out one of those gold, high bitrate CDs, Peter Gabriel's So, slots it into a CD player that by itself was bigger and more complicated looking than my whole stereo at home with so many knobs and shit, and cranks it to what he called about 30%. Lights blinking, animated EQs, level meters at the ready...
Red Rain kicks in and literally takes my breath away, not just in awe, but I mean the goddamn bass was so heavy and so crystal clear that it disrupted the airflow in the entire bakery. The volume was beyond screaming over, it was like you were standing on fucking stage in an arena next to the amps, but not only was it ear-shatteringly loud, it was crystal clear. Like the level of detail and fidelity in the recording broadcasted all these little human moments in the playing that I never had heard before and my mom pretty much blasted that record all the time for most of the tail end of the 80s. After a minute of Red Rain he skips to track two, Sledgehammer and holy shit, that bass riff on that system...felt like when you're standing waist deep in the ocean and a wave comes up with enough force to rock you on your feet before you recover.
And through all this, these women in the bakery just doing their thing, not a care in the world. Clearly a common occurrence there, 2 oclock in the morning, deep in an industrial area with nobody for miles around, this dude and his like $100,000+ stereo and him just running around like a madman making whatever the hell they were making.
Anyways, definitely nothing I would ever spend that kind of money on, but man, it was hard as hell to go back home to my shitty $20 headphones and my discman after hearing what $100k worth of high end stereo equipment sounds like lol
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I don't think anyone with self awareness or love for sound or music would call themselves an audiophile tbf.
Yea i bought a hifi amplifier for 50 bucks at the pawnshop and a pair of speaker from the fleamarket. It works great
I haven't fact-checked whether this quote is legit attributable to Alan Parsons but considering his production mastering pedigree it's believable. My dad used to sell audiophile equipment in the 80's and he would play Dark Side of the Moon and Alan Parsons Project to show off their hi-fi equipment. He said customers would put on their lower-quality records and it wouldn't sound as good (obviously), making their gear a harder sell.
EDIT: Parsons didn't say this, a web commenter did on an article about an interview with Parsons:
https://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/alan-parsons-on-audiophiles.html
I think we can trust Alan Parsons. The dude put a frickin laser on the moon!
Ahh yes. The Alan Parsons’ Project.
Well; he's right.
Buy good enough hardware and play some old music and it sounds old.
On plateau tier stuff, you just hear whatever it is. Including if the mastering was crap.
(Spoiler: I can't tell)
Man, tinnitus is such a money saver
I use your music to avoid going to therapy
Flat response gang checking in. A flat response speaker/monitor is the superior system.
All hail flat response! But alas, a lot of (and even most of, likely) the music is mastered to sound good on cheap stuff with bloated bass - as that is how it is listened by the paying majority. So when you (and me, love my Adam Audio stuff!) turn that on, we hear sad tunes... So getting a well mastered copy is equally important.
I love this comment. It's origins are from the 60's and was bandied about by rich white guys. The reason they said flat is best, is because that's all there was back then Mono was king.
As for that's how the music was meant to be recorded and heard. Ask a hip hop producer about that...
It's meant to be heard on shopping mall speakers 30 years later. That's when most of the royalties come in.
It's nice to know the estates of all our beloved 90s icons are so well off today
exactly how the music was meant to be recorded and heard.
Is it? Every producer is different, every studio has different equipment and most importantly, everyone's ears are different. You can't possibly know what they intended.
The truth is that the correct way to listen to music is however you like it to hear it!
From my limited understanding (and what I just read up right now), if you send audio through non-flat-response speakers multiple times (so stick a mic in front of the speaker to re-record it, and play it back through the speakers again) then each time your highs and lows would become more silent and the mids would become louder.
They're designed as the last piece in the chain, to then give some artistic coloring to the music.
Flat response is designed to not do that, so that what comes out sounds as much as possible like what you've put in.
In my personal experience as a very hobbyist musician, yes, of course I will also try to listen to my shit on phone speakers and try to make it not sound entirely terrible there. But you go from one consumer-grade speaker to the next and entirely different frequency ranges are fucked up.
Having some headphones that don't fuck with the sound (whether intentional or just crappy) is really helpful, because they give me a middleground that's likely to sound reasonable on multiple systems.
Much better than composing on a system that fucks it up in a specific way and then playing back on another system that fucks it up in a different way. That's pretty much guaranteed to sound terrible.
It absolutely is not. Albums aren't mixed to be listened to on studio monitors, they are mixed to sound good on consumer grade speakers because that's where people listen to music. Nowadays if you're listening on air pods that's probably the way it was meant to be listened to.
Yeah, not to mention the loudness war changing how things were mixed.
And like with most art, the artist doesn't get a say in how you appreciate it
Fuck the loudness war
WHAT DID YOU SAY????? SPEAK LOUDER
No, the reason why it sounds good on consumer grade equipment is exactly because it was mixed on flat response studio monitors. Flat response means little to no bias across the frequency spectrum and no enhancements.
Yes, I am aware that studio monitors (other than NS10Ms, lol) have a flat response and that albums are mixed primarily on studio monitors. But the people mixing those albums aren't mixing them to be listened to on studio monitors. There using their extensive knowledge to make that album sound its best how most people will be listening to it. Taking into account people listening in their car, on their phones, on their laptop speakers, headphones, air pods, home stereos, fucking TVs, etc.
No engineer worth their salt will be mixing an album to be listened to on studio monitors because that's not how normal people listen to music.
Edited to add: However, the point I kind of lost is people should listen however they want. I used to listen to albums that I knew very well on my monitors to get to know the speakers.
every studio has different equipment
That's why flat monitors and sound dampening are important.
A lot of money is spent to try and make a neutral room.
Audiophile: "The aluminum cones on these tweeters were precision engineered to give an unbiased audio signal at up to 30,000hz."
Musician: "Some asshole barfed into my amp and now it has this buzz and catches on fire if I leave it plugged in for too long, but I still like how it sounds so we recorded the whole album on it."
Reminds me of Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight. In addition to the hi-fi recording lines, there was basically a phone line designed to allow the sound engineer in the booth and the musician(s) to talk 2-way. Collins liked the effect it gave so they rigged up a way to pipe that audio into the desk. It gives his vocal performance a distant, numb feeling that reinforces the theme of antipathy. Because the equipment was worse.
I'll tell another one: The first time I ever heard The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it was an mp3 my father downloaded. He managed to find a version that sounded like it was taped off of the radio and then the tape played into the PC capturing at a low bitrate. It's my definitive version of the track; the result sounds foggy and mysterious like it's being played from somewhere in the fog across the lake, it bolsters the legend of the piece.
Can you share that MP3?
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Sennheiser HD-280 PRO
Flat response? Check
Nerdy-ass thick-as-hell telephone cord? Check
This is my preference too. I'm no audiophile, but I do like decent sound. Still a big fan of my 'ol ~2003 Beyer DT880s (the flat aluminum cup version) which are rather flat. For IEMs, Ety ER4S fits the bill as well, without spending a fortune.
I also recently picked up my first pair of ANC BT headphones. I'd not call them flat, but I'm quite impressed for the price. Earfun Wave Pros for ~$40.
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it's true. you can't listen to music with an audiophile in the room without having to listen to them go on and on about the production and "the bass is too loud" this or "too much compression on the vocals" that-- like bro...listen to the song or GTFO
I don't know if I qualify as an audiophile or not... I like expensive headphones and high resolution audio but I'm not one of those idiots that pays $10,000 for an HDMI cable.
I listen to music to enjoy it. The only thing that really stops me enjoying it is if it sounds like shit, which 99% of the time is because it's some badly encoded lossy stream being played through a shitty Bluetooth speaker on SBC codec. That is not what music is supposed to sound like.
Give me some basic appointment that correctly reproduces what the artist created, and I'll be happy. That doesn't have to cost a fortune, you just need a lossless stream with a half decent DAC/amp into decent headphones, and you'll be blown away. Spend like $300 on a pair of non-wireless analog headphones, $50-$75 on a USB DAC, and by a subscription to Tidal or Qobuz. It'll change how you think about music. But it doesn't turn you into an asshole.
Be honest, how many audiophiles do you actually know? I work in pro AV and have been surrounded by audiophiles for 20+ years and this applies to exactly 1 person I've ever known and it was freshman year of college
Sounds like this person you're describing is just a douchebag who wants to sound smart. We'd love to tell you all about our systems but we're not gonna complain about your Walmart soundbar unprompted
My belief is most people who describe themselves as audiophiles are in the 2nd group but think they're in the 1st group
My friend is a different sort of audiophile. He finds every setup and location to be a new opportunity to hear the music he loves in a way that he's never heard it before.
I always struggle with that for equalizers. I think, I understand the concept, but no matter how much I fuck up the sliders on the equalizer, I always find it interesting more than anything else. It sounds different, sure enough, but is it better or worse? No idea.
Oooh oooh oooh! Now's my chance to say a snobby thing! "They're called faders, not sliders."
I learned this from also calling them sliders.
Also, when I get to run a camera for work, I like fucking with the AV guys by asking them to "turn down the sound dimmer, I can hear myself too loud on the headset." (The comms mixer has knobs to control this at my end.)
That's really cool!! I've never thought about doing that but it reminds me of this:
Does he have any samples of where he's experimented at?
Samples? No. He just listens and enjoys. And pulls out some measuring equipment, lol
Your friend is one of us. A normal audiophile!
Me and my dad can't watch a movie or a sports broadcast without going on about the cameras and the lenses and the angles and the framerate and the exposure etc... and it drives my mom nuts. So hi mom.
I am an audio engineer for those events, I can't watch one with out calling out bad Camera and Audio...I'm well aware of all my mistakes too.
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I only know Alan Parsons from a quick reference in Austin Powers
I know it from 30 Rock
PETE: Oh, my god, you're gonna heckle him, like that time I invited you to see my cover band.
LIZ: Yeah, and today the world is better off without the Pete Hornberger Alan Parsons Project Project.
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